This Schadenfreudtastic year keeps on delivering - Paul Mason is caught slagging off his "hero", Jeremy Corbyn

'Appen, summat 'as 'appened as shouldn't 'ave 'appened.  Bugger!

The Brexit vote, David Cameron's resignation, George Osborne's subsequent defenestration, none of Project Fear's hysterical warnings coming true, that virtue-signalling blister Keith Vaz being caught on camera consorting with two male prostitutes, Ed Balls reduced to waddling around on our television screens smothered in spandex...I thought I'd supped my fill of political humiliations and disappointments for 2016. But now one of my least favourite lefties, hard-left Corbyn fanboy and former BBC Newsnight Economics Editor (FFS) Paul Mason - who many had assumed would replace grisly Guardian Stalinist Seamus Milne as Jezza's propaganda supremo, and certainly seemed to be angling for the job - well, the poor Northern working-class lad has dropped a truly enormous bollock with a clang clearly audible from Penzance to Thurso.

In case you haven't heard the story yet, The Sun has published a recording of Mason in a café at the recent Labour Party conference in Liverpool complaining that Corbyn doesn't appeal to working-class voters, and stating a preference for someone like ex-soldier Clive Lewis as party leader, cos he's like well-hard, mate. (You can read and listen to the whole thing here.)

Could have been worse, I suppose - Mason might have been recorded agreeing to participate in a dodgy offshore tax evasion scheme, or praising Donald Trump's plans to expel Muslims,  or we might have discovered that he actual speaks with a Home Counties accent more suited to someone who inhabits (as Mason does) an agreeable Victorian terraced house in Kentish Town. Let's just hope Mason was treating his confidant to a traditional North London Northerner's meal of ciabatta wi' dripping and whippet liver mousse, with a triple venti, soy, no-foam, fair-trade latte served in a chipped enamel mug with a fading portrait of Hugo Chavez on one side, and Che Guevara on the other. Of course, Mason wouldn't be doing any of the things listed above - but to hear that he had wouldn't be that much more shocking than listening to him dismiss Steptoe as unelectable and out of touch with t'workers.

What makes it all very odd is that only a month before knifing the Dear Leader in the back, Mason had been telling us all that it was Steptoe's very electability which had led "guardians of elite power inside the Labour party" to conclude that "this is our last chance, otherwise the guy has the chance of leading the party into an election and that election is winnable." It's almost as if left-wingers are in the habit of saying things they don't believe. (Next, you'll be telling me that senior Labour politicians oppose selective education in public while either paying for their own children to attend prestigious private schools or sending them to top-rated grammar schools - and surely nobody in public life would imagine they could get away with such disgusting hypocrisy without egalitarian social justice warriors like Diane Abbott, "Baroness" Shami Chakrabarti, Seamus Milne - or Paul Mason - calling them to account.)

Let's face it, it's a bit hard to deny having said something when there exists a tape recording of you actually, you know,  saying it. Instead of defending what he said or trying the old "taken out of context" ploy, Mason went full Vaz and blamed the newspaper instead:

Scabs? Glorious? You sad man. And what is it about lefties and the word "scum" (or, apparently, Sc*m)? 

But you weren't at your house, were you. You're a well-known journalist/political activist and one of the most vocal media supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, and you were attending the annual conference of the party Corbyn "leads",  where you were saying things in a public place which would appear to directly contradict what you've been telling us for months. Here's Mason's eventual non-denial denial:

I guess we'll have to mark this down as a three-scab incident.

Glorious, indeed.