WELL, panto season seems to have started seriously early in the Parliamentary Labour Party this year, with Angela Eagle as Cinderella fleeing the ball at the stroke of midnight and former big pharma lobbyist Owen Smith seemingly seeking to identify as a hybrid of Aladdin and Che Guevara.

Meanwhile the Blairites are trying to cast Corbyn in the role of wicked uncle — it must be the beard.

The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of farcical allegations hurled at the party leader are the bizarre claims of bullying made by that wellknown Labour figure… Conor McGinn. McGinn, and I had to look this up, is a Labour whip — that is, one of those whose job it is to bully, harangue and intimidate MPs into toeing the party line.

It’s a brutal line of work, normally only pursued by the most ruthless and vicious among a profession renowned for its vicious ruthlessness — real bastards, effectively.

But it would appear that McGinn may be a more sensitive flower than his job description would seem to imply.

The St Helens North MP, in one of the more outlandish accusations of recent weeks, yesterday accused the party leader of threatening to phone his dad to bring him into line.

How old is he, 12? Was he worried his pocket money might be stopped? McGinn said: “I am afraid I could no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of him talking about a kinder, gentler politics when I knew for a fact that he had proposed using my family against me in an attempt to bully me into submission because he didn’t like something I said.”

He added that he and other Labour MPs had been subjected to a “torrent of abuse and threats” from Corbyn supporters.

Hmm, I seem to recall Eagle saying the same thing a week or so ago claiming she had been subjected to homophobic abuse at a meeting she didn’t actually attend or those around her hinting that Corbynistas may have been behind bricking a window in her constituency office — which it transpired was not her office window but an unrelated glass facade in the building in which her office is situated.

If this is really the best the anti-Corbyn lobby can come up with it illustrates just how pathetically inadequate to the task they are.