Andy McSmith's Diary: Jeremy Corbyn practising hard to live up to his Privy duties

The Labour leader's office insists he will do what he has to do to be initiated into the Privy Council

Jeremy Corbyn is due to be initiated into the Privy Council, and will be rehearsed into the rites by special officials (Rex)

Jeremy Corbyn is not going to snub the Queen. I’m sorry to disappoint his republican admirers, but his office insists he will do what he has to do to be initiated into the Privy Council, even if that includes kneeling and reverentially brushing the royal hand with his lips.

His people insist that no offence was intended and none taken over his failure to be there on the first available date.

They are not fazed by a report that their man has supposedly been stripped of his “Right Honourable” title. That was a mistake by Parliament’s official website, who gave him the Right Honourable title before he had done what he needs to do to earn it, and the Office of the Privy Council had the mistake rectified.

Corbyn has complained that he does not know what the initiation rite for Privy Councillors is. But that is easily sorted, because there are a couple of officials whose job is to explain the whole performance to new initiates, and to rehearse them.

Not only will Corbyn kneel before the monarch, he will do a practise kneel in front of a couple of courtiers to make sure he knows the drill. And once that is all done, he will truly be Right Honourable.

“Jeremy is going to join the Privy Council, and he’ll do what he has to do to join. We’ve got you telling us he’s got to do all these things,” said a spokesman, referring to kneeling and kissing the royal hand. “We don’t know, do we.” Well, they’ll soon find out.

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Jess Phillips, the outspoken new Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, has suggested a new rule for political discourse – the first person to say “neoliberal” has lost the argument.

Just a few hours after she had made that suggestion, Professor Steve Keen, from Kingston University, London, a founder member of the Jeremy Corbyn academic fan club, let his Twitter followers know how unimpressed he is that the Nobel Prize of Economics has been won by Angus Deaton, a Scottish economist who takes the optimistic view that poverty is declining under capitalism.

Professor Keen tweeted: “Nobel Prize in Economics is decided by a totally separate Neoliberal oriented institution.”

Victory to Professor Deaton.

It’s a bake off!

Spotted outside the launch of the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign: Ukip’s press officer Gawain Towler was handing out cupcakes, decorated in Ukip party colours, each bearing the slogan “Say No”.

Femme fatale

Reading an anguished speech which the Earl of Desart delivered in the House of Lords on 20 October 1915, a week after Edith Cavell was executed in Brussels for helping Allied prisoners to escape to Holland, it is striking to note that the Earl was not shocked that Cavell had been arrested and put on trial, nor indeed that she had been sentenced to death. There was a war on.

If the British authorities had caught a German agent helping prisoners escape, they would have shot him. What horrified the Earl was that the Germans had made a woman face the firing squad.

“Though that sentence might be passed, it was one that most emphatically would never have been carried out on a woman by any other country but Germany,” he declared.

He was wrong. Almost two years to the day after Cavell’s execution, the Dutch dancer Margaretha Zelle, known by the stage name Mata Hari, was shot by a French firing squad for passing information to the Germans.

War is nasty.