I like Corbyn but he's a gentleman amateur in a vicious pro sport – it's time for him to honourably step aside

The right-wing media have made a caricature of the Labour leader, and now he has little hope of winning the rest of the country over. A pulverising defeat for a Corbyn manifesto, however much you and I may agree with it, will not help the disabled

Jeremy Corbyn’s party managed to exceed the low expectations ahead of the elections (PA)

In case it escaped you in all the excitement, emergency legislation was passed last Tuesday, 20 hours after an East Midlands football club secured the title.

Under Section 4 (B) vii of The Leicester City (Mandatory Analogies) Act, 2016, it is now a criminal offence to examine anything – anything – through any prism other than the Foxes’ 5,000-1 miracle victory.

Brave columnists will defy it, and I’ll see them on visiting days wherever Her Majesty decides to put them up.

Being a coward, and more in sorrow than contempt for a principled man, I observe this of Jeremy Corbyn. If last year’s shock election win was a version of Leicester’s triumph, Corbo is now playing in the political Champions League – and that’s a competition he, like Claudio Ranieri’s lads, can't possibly win.

While Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper were overrated and vulnerable, he now faces mightier opponents. I refer not so much to David Cameron and whoever succeeds him before 2020. On current form, these divided, complacent Tories – the Chelsea FC of the piece – will be there for the taking. This is why last week’s results were appalling for Labour.

The mayoral victory has no national implications, London being a left-leaning country within a country. Nor do the Scottish results, Scotland being lost to Labour for a generation at least. It is the English council results that portend so hideously. To lose even a small number of seats against this ruling party at this time is a terrible omen.

Little blame attaches to Corbyn. He remains a gentleman amateur in a vicious pro sport, as his languid response to Ken Livingstone’s latest imbecility confirmed, but given the leap of class from backbench maverick to party leader, he has performed with calm and skill.

In this analogy, the Barcelona, Bayern or Real Madrid hunting the Islington fox is a right-wing English press – the Mail, Murdoch and Telegraph titles – which will not cease until it has torn him to pieces.

In effect, by cementing him in the public imagination as an incompetent, unpatriotic, Marxist terrorist sympathiser, it already has. Nothing he can say will resonate with those in marginals whose votes he needs. Every syllable will be heard in the tones of the caricature created by this section of old media.

Now if this truly is the age of miracles, with Leicester winning the Premier League and a Muslim guy storming to London’s mayoralty, I reluctantly hope that everything does come in a trio. The third miracle in mind is Jeremy Corbyn, an unusually sane and humble man, accepting that his leadership makes removing the Tories not more but far less likely, and acting on it.

He cannot be ousted by conventional methods, since the members would give him another landslide. But he can sacrifice himself for his party and country.

He can go further. He can try to do what none has managed before, and attempt to place such pressure on Alan Johnson, with a public appeal to his sense of duty, that the chilled-out postie finally takes the helm.

Much about Johnson is not to Corbyn’s taste (nor, for what it’s worth, to mine). He is glued to the Blairite centre right. He is idle. He has a yellow streak, as displayed when he sacked his drugs adviser, David Nutt, for daring to advise him about drugs.

But he is widely liked and trusted, and if the Conservatives remain on their present path, the next election might just be winnable under his leadership.

The oldest internal political battle is between idealism and expediency. When Republican primary voters elect candidates with whom they agree about everything but are certain to lose, over those they agree with about 75 per cent who are likely to win, we consider them doolally.

In a utopian world, we would be rewarded for cleaving to beliefs. In this world, Britain has not given a left-of-centre manifesto a resounding electoral win for half a century. Since Harold Wilson’s 1966 landslide, Labour’s successes have been either dead-heats (Wilson twice in 1974) or won from the centre right (Tony Blair, thrice).

That reveals something about England. A pulverising defeat for a Corbyn manifesto, however much you and I may agree with it, will not help the disabled.

Many have tried to persuade Johnners to come to the aid of his party since Gordon Brown found himself on death row in 2008. Time and again he has chosen to spend more time with his QPR season ticket and rock star fantasies.

It is a long shot that Corbyn would be the latest to try, and a longer shot that Johnson would surrender if he did. But both eventualities are shorter than 5,000-1, and this is Labour’s only hope of short term recovery. So, in accordance with Section 7 (D) xvii of the Act, the Dilly-ding Dilly-dong Amendment, I ask both men to think on this.

What would Ranieri do if he felt he was dragging a club he loved to relegation? And what would the sainted Claudio do if someone asked him to save that club from the drop? I think we all know the answers to both.