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What a tiny-minded little country little England can be. Today, we are invited to be outraged at a member of the House of Lords. About what are we to be outraged? The existence of an anachronistic insult to democracy that should have been consigned to history decades ago? The payment of hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to unelected aristocrats and bishops for no discernible purpose whatsoever?

No. None of the above. We are to be outraged because a member of the House of Lords has been – allegedly – caught snorting cocaine off a whore’s breasts.

To be fair, I do agree that the man should be censured for his conduct. After all, everybody knows that breasts are far from a stable and safe platform from which to ensnoot the Bolivian marching powder. What with the wobbling and giggling and jiggling and all from the snortee, the snorter ends up looking less like an immortal drug-crazed lord of sex and more like the arse of a startled baby that’s just been talcum powdered.

Furthermore, the man was inhaling his drug with the use of a rolled-up £5 note. A fiver. Very poor taste.

Finally, the man should have turned to the media with flaring – obviously – nostrils and declared: ‘So what? So I took cocaine and consorted with whores? I didn’t con an entire nation into electing a bunch of public school bullies to enrich themselves and their mates at everybody else’s expense while kicking the poor and sick into the gutter, did I? Now oil a fresh whore and have her sent to my office in the Lords. And fuck off.’

But no. There’ll be the usual craven display of cowardice and grovelling and will-he- won’t-he resign stories, and at the end of the day there’ll still be peers and a self-righteous media and hypocrisy and corruption. And, hopefully, whores and cocaine.

Because – and let me absolutely clear about this – if ever I find myself in a position of power I will, alongside introducing a range of socialist policies including fair pay, equality, nationalisation and old ideas like a national education service and a free National Health Service, I will also avail myself of all the whores and cocaine to which my position entitles me.

Neither will sway my policies at all. I will insist that all whores involved are paid at least a living wage and belong to a properly constituted trade union, and I will insist that my cocaine comes from a Fairtrade source, obviously, and you won’t find me wasting the precious cargo by scattering it all over a pair of playful puppies, oh no, but that’s it. Thank you very much, madam, a quick sneeze or 100 and on to the matters of the day.

Because, facetious though this may sound, there is a serious point: I do believe that decency and efficiency in policy matters more than the private life of anybody. Bill Clinton had the sexual morals of a polecat, just like JFK, but we remember both fondly for trying to make a small difference on the side of right against wrong.

Take for a wild example our Chancellor, George Osborne. If he were – and he obviously won’t be – found to have consorted with prostitutes or, indeed, taken cocaine, would that become the most reprehensible thing about him? Of course not.

He would still be the moral coward who is kicking the poor and sick while enabling his rich chums to gorge their greed on the nation’s former wealth and assets. Snorting cocaine would be the very least of the crimes of a man whose policies have driven the disabled to suicide, whose policies are privatising our once great health service, whose policies enable people reliant on public services like telecoms or heat or water to ripped the fuck off every single day of their lives by a shoddy, profiteering service.

No, it’s all back to front. If it weren’t – if we were a country that insisted on democracy, on decency and social justice in policy, on a media that wasn’t run for the private financial benefit of its unelected liege lords – then public life might attract the serious-minded, the people with a mission to do good, rather than the people who want to stick their septumally challenged hooters between the proud, freshly-dusted tits of a tolerant whore.

Until then, we must expect outrage at the least outrageous, deployed as a decoy to turn our pitiful attention away from the real crimes being perpetrated under our noses – such as selling back banks to rich chums at a loss to the public of roughly the amount of money being denied to those who need help from welfare payments and child tax credits because rich employers don’t pay them enough money.

What a country. What a tiny-minded little country.

Corbyn blimey

Meanwhile, I do hope you’re enjoying the Labour leadership contest now. What fun to watch the right turning on dear old Jeremy Corbyn, who must, at 65, be absolutely horrified at the prospect of having to lead the wretched party and its anodyne Tristram Hunts and Liz Kendalls and unprincipled power seekers.

How mortified the right are that a simple message, plainly dealt, reinforcing simple policies to do with treating people equally and fairly and distributing a society’s strength with a modicum of justice and decency, is resonating so very much with hundreds of thousands of people. Gosh, it’s almost like they’ve been rattled by an opposition with ideas that oppose the rotten status quo.

The Labour party – the Labour party – is awash with regret that this democratic process is taking place, awash with threats that he’ll have to be ousted if he wins a democratic election, awash with rumour that the party will split if Corbyn is democratically elected. Tony Blair said people voting for him because their heart said they should ‘needed a transplant’. A Corbyn supporter slapped him down beautifully, saying the Labour party doesn’t need lessons on hearts from a man who charges £300k for a 20-minute speech about world hunger.

Go on Jeremy, I say. Win the bloody thing. If you do, I might even join the party.

He won’t win an election, you say? So what. There’s no point to power without principle.

Let’s not listen to this little country’s ruling generation, the generation that enjoyed education, free universities, health care, pensions and then set about denying everybody else the same rights. It was the only generation, the over-64s, that voted in a majority for the Tories in the General Election, but it did so in such numbers that it won the election for them, given our undemocratic polling system.

Well, let’s vote for one of their number who hasn’t forgotten what put him where he is, and see if the best of us can win next time. Jeremy Corbyn has enthused an army of young people, and it’s the young people who are having to reap the bitter harvest of Tory and Tory-lite rule. They will want change.