When, two Times journalists started promoting their forthcoming book on Twitter by suggesting it would expose the reality of factionalism in Corbyn's Labour, my first thought was that they were trying to exploit Left Twitter to drum up pre-sales...
Then I began to wonder whether, just maybe, these journalists might actually do what journalists are supposed to do - what virtually none of their colleagues had done for 5 years - and actually interrogate discrepancies between the dominant story and the overwhelming evidence...
Sadly, today's extract in the Sunday Times weighs in favour of my initial scepticism. The journalists paint a picture of Labour's GE19 campaign as riddled with internal conflict, portraying Corbyn as at once a meddling control freak and a useless bystander in his own campaign...
I spent some time on the Labour campaign bus for an independent film project and nothing of what's been published in the Sunday Times has the slightest whiff of the reality I saw. There was no suggestion of any tensions between Jeremy and his aides...
no sense of the campaign team being in any way downhearted or disunited, no hint of Jeremy's wife upsetting aides, and Jeremy seemed perfectly comfortable travelling on the bus...
Contrary to the authors' trumped up claims, what this extract seems to reveal is not any kind of sensational expose, but rather an ever more desperate effort to deligitimise the Corbyn project; an effort which began in 2015 and shows no signs of abating...
and it speaks volumes about just how vital, hopeful and irreversible that project is.
