The cemetery at Hammam Chott is as beautiful a setting as could be wished for in a final resting place. On Tunisia’s eastern coast, the sea shines blue along the horizon, green forest covers mountains overhead, and a few trees are outlined in bright sun upon one of the hillsides that envelop the cemetery. Graves run lengthwise and in marble; ornamental stone Qur’ans across the headstones, a few verses of Arabic. Plants grow among the graves, including here and there the smell of wild herbs, thriving in the distinctive red earth of the Mediterranean’s rich and claylike soil.

It is one of many bizarre quirks in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party that a place so peaceful and distant could have played any role in British politics, still less one so inauspicious as it came to. The Hammam Chott suburb of Tunis, some twenty-five miles along roads of heavy traffic from the central district, is also the scene of the Israeli bombing perpetrated against Palestinians and Tunisians on October 1, 1985.