The quality of British exports to America is in decline: Piers Morgan, James Corden, Prince Harry. Last week, however, it entered a death spiral: the American debut of Jeremy Corbyn.

He couldn’t leave it alone, could he? Any normal terrorist-fondler would have thrown in the towel after his electoral spanking in November 2019 and retreated to his allotment, there to grow ethical marrows — for Jeremy has yet to develop an ethical marrow — and sulk in his shed like Achilles in his tent, only vegetarian.

But Corbyn is ever so humble, hence the Greek fisherman’s cap, and the left in America are ever so naïve and nasty. So when the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) needed a keynote speaker for their conference, who could they turn to but the modest and misunderstood scourge of the Zionists?

The DSA aren’t especially democratic: like all loony-left groups, they’re would-be dictators. They aren’t really socialists either: only the running dogs of capitalism can afford the rent in trendy metropolitan areas like Brooklyn or Portland. They are, though, American, because they understand very little about the outside world, and not much more about their own country. This is because they have attended expensive private universities.

Hard as it may be to believe, Corbyn looks like a winner when viewed from a distance of 3,500 miles with both eyes closed. The Clinton machine robbed Bernie Sanders of the Democratic nomination in 2016 through procedural changes, and Team Obama got behind Joe Biden for the 2020 nomination. But the Corbyn machine had the momentum to carry their man to two general elections.

Apart from that, Sanders and Corbyn have much else in common. They’re both winners when it comes to the spoils of the workers’ revolution. Bernie is worth at least $2 million. Jeremy, according to Spears magazine, is worth £3 million. You see, just like Jeremy says, the American way really isn’t the best.

They differ, of course, on Israel. The senator from Vermont has been there, and even volunteered at Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha-Amakim in the Sixties. Sanders condescends to agree that Israel should exist, and then condescends some more because Israel is no longer socialist. The sage of Islington is reluctant to set a sandalled foot anywhere in Occupied Palestine, unless it is en route to Gaza or the West Bank.

The DSA is closer to Jeremy than Bernie on the twenty-first century Judenfrage. When the members of the New York chapter of the DSA aren’t serving coffee or fixing bicycles, they’re working for BDS. “Do you pledge not to travel to Israel?” they demanded of candidates before issuing their endorsements for New York’s city council elections in 2020.

Jeremy is a prophet without honour in his own land, so it’s sad that he couldn’t meet his new friends in person. Not because he’d stumble over that quaint question all travellers to the US must answer — “Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” — but because of Covid-19 restrictions. Still, virtual Jeremy sounded much the same as real-life Jeremy: a cranky garden gnome who’s spent too much time online.

“The rich get richer while the rest of us are faced with appalling wages,” said Jeremy, who will receive a £1.6 million pension when he retires from the salt mines of Westminster.

“The few, the richest and most powerful, are organized all over the world,” Corbyn warned. He didn’t name the members of this global conspiracy, but he did, after a charming anecdote about striking cotton workers in Victorian Lancashire, describe how his Project for Peace & Justice had “mobilised in solidarity with the people of Palestine” during the recent Hamas-Israel fighting.

You can’t teach an old dog new whistles. Corbyn’s melody was explicit in Rashida Tlaib’s address to the DSA, which speciously linked “my family in Palestine that continue to live under military occupation and how that interacts with [Detroit,] this beautiful black city I grew up in”. It doesn’t in any way, but that didn’t stop Tlaib, the Congressional Representative for Dearborn, Michigan, from saying “the structure we’re living under right now is designed to exploit the rest of us for their own profit” and that “they do it from Gaza to Detroit”, whoever we — I mean, they — might be.

During the Hamas-Israel fighting last May, President Biden visited Tlaib’s constituency and told her, “You’re a fighter, and God thank you for being a fighter.” He also said, “I admire your intellect.”

Dominic Green is editor of the Spectator’s World edition