I have long wanted to visit Venezuela for its mountain scenery, glaciers, rain forest, great plains and the Orinoco delta. The country ranks seventh for biodiversity, featuring rare and magnificent species. Such colour, variety and grandeur.

But it’s a long way and the cost is off-putting, so I shall probably never manage to arrange my visit. I’m not too disappointed though because, when Mr Corbyn comes to power – sooner than you think – Venezuela will come to me. Corbyn is a great admirer of Venezuela’s former Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, saying: “He has done so much for his country and for a wider world.” Chavez is dead now but his successor Maduro is carrying on – and even improving upon – the former president’s good work.

As a good Marxist, Maduro understands that you can get that wonderful Communist system to work perfectly only after you have seized absolute power and political control. And here we must congratulate him on his 100% success.

In 2015 Maduro’s party lost the general election – a bit of a blow to any aspiring leader which would have disheartened a lesser man than Maduro. He may have lost but he was not going to be defeated. The day after the election results were declared, he announced, “I’m going to prevent the opposition coming to power by hook or by crook.” Interesting word, crook. So he ignored the verdict of the people, remained in office, sacked the judges, appointed new ones and established personal control of the military.

Forget such hell-holes as Somalia and Syria, Venezuela is the most murderous country on earth. There is a killing every twenty minutes and, over the last decade, millions have been slaughtered – more than those killed on both sides in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Crime is the number one national occupation but only 2% of offenders are prosecuted.

The prisons are squalid and holding twenty times the population they were designed for. There is imprisonment without trial. There is widespread use of torture. As one Caracas journalist put it. “Thousands of people just disappear.”

Yes, Corbyn’s heroes Chavez and Maduro  have certainly done a great deal for Venezuela.

The country has greater oil reserves than Saudi Arabia but its people are scavenging for food in dustbins and rioting is constant. Fertile fields are left barren and grain production has fallen by 80% in just a few years.

The currency is worthless and people require wheelbarrows to carry the notes necessary for the daily purchase of what little there is on sale – reminding us of Germany’s hyper-inflation of the 1930s.

Tropical diseases are rife and there is a diphtheria epidemic. But the hospitals have no drugs, medicines or other vital supplies.

The British government has strongly urged none of our people to travel to Venezuela.

Now observers fear the country is on the verge of civil war.

It must require a very special magic for a political leader to bring a fertile and oil rich nation to starvation and the brink of dissolution. It does: it requires a Marxist magic of the sort that Corbyn admires and promises to bring to our country.

Corbyn repeats time and again that he will introduce stratospherically-high taxation. Profligate public spending and borrowing. Endless subsidies to the shiftless underclass and to the “state-uneducated” youth who adore him because he promises them the earth. Massive pay rises to his supporters in the public services and the industries he vows to re-nationalise. The establishment of a nomenclatura of his political cronies. Co-ordinated industrial chaos. The promise to rise to power by months of rabble-rousing on the streets culminating in “a march of a million” to overturn the results from the ballot boxes.

Coming soon then: Britain Venezuelan style.