Sketch: Never mind Carillion, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are the stocks to short

When, in 2015, a man called Jeremy Corbyn emerged from three decades in hiding in the House of Commons to become Labour leader, the conventional wisdom is that it would herald the return of ideology to British politics after at least two decades in hiding.

Of course, we weren’t to know that in less than a year, the Conservative Party would also conspire to deliver itself into the clutches of its lunatic fringes via the medium of the EU referendum, and so the two parties would in fact become mutual guarantors of national self-destruction, which is unfortunate to say the least.

But when a huge outsourcing company goes bust, torching thousands of jobs and several billion pound contracts with the Government, that’s the sort of thing that should, come Prime Minister’s Questions, herald a return to something that looked like meaningful discussion of crucial ideological difference.

What we had instead was meaningless nonsense. It was as if the exchanges had been set to Benny Hill music, with observers engaged in a futile chase around Jeremy Corbyn’s questions for something that looked like it might be prepared to flesh out a bit of anything that might make sense.

Scarcely a year ago, shadow cabinet minister Kerry McCarthy revealed that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t know the difference between a hedge fund and a loan shark. Now here he was demanding to know why Theresa May hadn’t taken heed of all the hedge funds shorting Carillion stock, and as an appropriate and measured response, cancelled the various billion-pound-plus contracts it had with them, a course of action that would have achieved nothing other than to hasten the collapse he is now apparently so angry about.

Theresa May patiently pointed out that the Government is a “customer of Carillion, not the manager”, to which Jeremy Corbyn bellowed in response: “It’s the Government who’ve been handing out contracts! It’s the Government’s responsibility to ensure Carillion is properly managed!”

Painful though it is to point out, it is worth repeating that this is a man who has extremely genuine designs on running the country, and yet remains absolutely 100 per cent unaware of how anything in the world outside left-wing political campaign meetings actually functions.

“The share price fell by 90 per cent!” he boomed, which it did, itself fuelled by hedge fund speculation that Jeremy Corbyn now apparently thinks to be the root of all earthly wisdom, after long decades of denouncing everything they do and stand for, at least for as long as he is not getting them mixed up with loan sharks.

Naturally, there is a legitimate and grown-up debate to be had here, of the kind that, at his first Prime Minister’s Questions several political lifetimes ago, Jeremy Corbyn expressed an interest in having.

Do huge companies, with all the efficiencies they offer, have something to offer governments that it is superior to the government undertaking all of its own responsibilities itself? If all these low-margin, private government contracts are enough to send a big company bankrupt, does the taxpayer want to play the Carillion role instead?

It’s a complex matter. But all Jeremy Corbyn could do was advertise that it’s a debate that exists far beyond the reach of his ability.

His now traditional, straight-to-YouTube viral speech-cum-question at the end, which took the form of a crescendoing rant through every outsourced government contract of the last seven-and-a-half years, was faintly interesting however.

“Capita! Atos! G4S at the Olympics!” They’d all let the people down apparently. But they’d also, for the most part, kept the woman standing opposite him in the Home Office for six years. Being able to put someone else’s name above the door of a terrible cock-up is a relatively new opportunity for governments, and no one has been served better by it than Theresa May. That she survived for so long in the traditional graveyard of British politics owes a great deal to this new ruse of nationalising credit and privatising blame.

Indeed, should all these services be brought in house, the logical extension is that hedge funds will be able to take positions on the government of the day.

That’s not altogether likely however. For a start, if you wanted to sell Theresa May short, you would in theory have to find someone out there in the market who thinks she’s going to rise. Good luck with that.