Up to a year after the cataclysmic volcanic explosion on the island of Krakatoa near Java in August 1883, strange things were washing up on beaches thousands of miles away. They included floating rafts of volcanic pumice carrying groups of human skeletons, which landed on the coast of east Africa. Great upheavals can have strange results.
And so I looked on with incredulity as a pumice stone raft, set adrift by the Corbyn revolution, fetched up this week on the political beach bearing a skeleton from my own past. This apparition took the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s new deputy director of strategy and communications, Steve Howell. Described as the founder of a South Wales PR agency, Freshwater, from which he was “taking indefinite leave of