This is why the press is ‘out to get’ Jeremy Corbyn but ignores Theresa May’s mistakes

This week Theresa May quoted a Twitter user in PMQs who, it transpires, had defended the man who killed Jo Cox and said of the recent killing of a Polish man in Britain: ‘Every time a Polish person gets lamped, it will always be a Brexit hate crime, even if they asked for it’

Theresa May had two months to formulate her pre-prepared jokes at Prime Minister’s Questions this week – and yet they arrived with all the grace and subtlety of the ram-packed 11am Virgin East Coast service to Newcastle. Jeremy Corbyn “is a laughing stock on rolling stock”. Brexit Schmexit. The real scandal is that someone got paid taxpayers’ money to come up with that.

The other gag was more intriguing. With the whole summer to work on it, it is arguable that in choosing to read a tweet from a member of the public by the name of @swingaleg, who had ungenerously pointed out to the Labour leader that “don’t know” was currently faring better than he in the Potential Prime Ministerial approval ratings, it has been suggested the May entourage should have taken a minute to check out a bit of the @swingaleg back catalogue.

It transpires that Corbyn is not the only person to find themselves cut to the online quick by the razor-sharp barbs of this singularly incisive cultural commentator. “Every time a Polish person gets lamped, it will always be a Brexit hate crime, even if they asked for it,” he pointed out, in the wake of the killing of a Polish man by a gang of teenagers on the streets of Harlow.

He has also defended the man who killed Jo Cox and told the novelist Elizabeth Day to “piss off you stupid, feminist piece of shit”.

The @swingaleg back catalogue has, in the last 24 hours, sent gentle ripples across the surface of the outraged community, noticed by this media organisation and one or two others. But it is not unreasonable to imagine, had Team Corbyn done the same, the usual media feeding frenzy would be at full power.

So is Theresa May getting an easy ride? As the political world obsesses over the latest chapter in Labour’s slow-motion harakiri, should more attention be being paid to the people who are actually making the decisions, not least since they are currently making the most important decisions that have been made in the UK for half a century or more?

Why isn’t the press “out to get her” like they are Corbyn? The answer is not altogether straightforward. Certainly, like every new Prime Minister, and indeed every new leader of the opposition, she has a right to a honeymoon period. Corbyn had one. He has had a full year now to earn the hostility he now receives, and earn it he most certainly has.

But more to the point, it takes a new government a certain amount of time to make its enemies. For example, in the high summer of 1997, it would be years before Gordon Brown had set up a deep and complex operation to brief against Tony Blair and his allies.

When whole new government departments form, like the Department for International Trade, and the Department for Exiting the European Union, well-placed individuals determined to undermine them or do them damage for their own, often widely varying, reasons have not yet come into being.

All new Prime Ministers deserve a honeymoon. But with a premiership as complex and crucial, and forged in the most angry and divisive chaos that has probably ever been known, it will not last. That cannot be in any doubt.