Tom Peck's Sketch: Is Dan Jarvis watery or just as cool as a cucumber?

What the member for Barnsley Central needs now is a front story – some actual politics

Dan Jarvis, the MP for Barnsley Central, is a former major in the Parachute Regiment who served in three war zones (PA)

Dan Jarvis is not another New Labour smoothie. He isn’t intensely relaxed about anything. He’s going to be “tough on inequality and tough on the causes of inequality.” And as if to prove it, he invited the Westminster press corps to a room rented out by a leading New Labour think-tank and plied them with cucumber water.

It was surprisingly refreshing. Who knew that if you drop something that’s 96 per cent water in to water, the ensuing change in flavour is just subtle enough to think you’re getting something you’ve never tried before?

As politicians go, Jarvis has the sort of backstory that makes Odysseus look like a spad from Defra. Paratrooper. Widower. Northerner. “I’ve been to three war zones and managed to do it without shedding a tear,” he began. “But I cried the first time I heard the Barnsley Youth Choir.” This was meant to be a compliment.

What the member for Barnsley Central needs now is a front story – some actual politics. He made extensive flirtations with running for the Labour leadership last year, before ultimately swiping left and inadvertently rubbing the Corbyn lamp as he did so. There are council and London mayoral elections in May. If Labour underperforms there will be manoeuvres to get the Genie of Islington North back in his backbench bottle (Stephen Kinnock said as much in an interview with the Huffington Post barely an hour later). Even the most right-wing of the party’s moderates know that anything that tastes like a Blairite won’t be able to do it, not now.

“New Labour were intensely relaxed about things they shouldn’t have been intensely relaxed about,” he continued. “Labour needs to be tough on inequality, tough on the causes of inequality.” What’s that familiar taste?

“The people I meet, the people I am talking about, don’t attend economic seminars,” he said. “They don’t follow the doctrinal discussions of the Labour Party.” It was as unveiled an attack on his shadow Chancellor as you’re likely to get, and only fractionally undermined by it having taken place right at the start of an event billed as a “Keynote Address on Labour’s Economic Agenda”.

Jarvis, he told us, would not be “talking language from another planet” but “rooting my remarks today in a place and an experience 175 miles from here” – Barnsley. Not that that meant he didn’t have time or the inclination to carry on into a third decade the discussion about who has or hasn’t fixed the roof in various weather conditions.

“Stop gazing at the stars and start focusing on the foundations,” he warned George Osborne, who we must now assume has been fixing the roof at night, or at least staring out of the hole that’s still in it.

You don’t get to be a major in the Parachute Regiment without knowing a bit about when to engage the enemy. Such is Corbyn’s unprecedented popularity among the membership Jarvis also knows, to paraphrase another popular combatant, that if he strikes Corbyn down he may well become more powerful than he can possibly imagine. How could a leadership challenge possibly work? “I don’t spend a large amount of time worrying about the processes of the Labour Party,” he said.

Cucumbers can be frightening. One of the biggest YouTube sensations of the past year has been the discovery that, should you clandestinely lay one on the floor behind a cat, it is liable to mistake it for an unimaginably large stool, assume there is a lion in the area, jump 10ft in the air and bolt for its life.

As a political metaphor, that’s not particularly instructive. But at least it’s not watery.