Sooner or later someone is going to have to tell Jeremy Corbyn and his team about places that aren’t Islington, experts have warned.
Senior political analysts are working round the clock to come up with ways to inform the Labour leader that places exist where broccoli and quinoa aren’t major dietary choices, and there are pubs that sell beer and not hand-brewed artisan hop-based ale.
Strategies this far suggested include playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony and leaving packets of Yorkshire Tea in Labour Party offices to break him in gently.
Initial tests on figures close to Corbyn resulted in a close aide having an attack of the vapours and needing a sit down after the word ‘Barnsley’ was mentioned.
“We’ve got something to work with”, we were told.
“We’re confident that Jeremy has heard of Liverpool, which is a start, and he occasionally mentions ‘the miners’ and ‘Thatcher’ which gives us hope that he’s at least vaguely aware there is a ‘north’ as a general concept.
“Although we’ve no idea how we’re going to convince him it’s not still 1985 there.”
Reports from the North indicate that Labour faces an uphill struggle, as people in places as diverse as Sunderland, Dundee and Blackburn remain inexplicably uninterested in an ongoing ideological purity contest taking place amongst London-based latte-supping Internet Marxists, and had instead just decided to get on with their lives.
Sources close to the Labour leader declared the North to be a secondary matter, as Israel is much more important.