Faced with a pack of snappers during a visit to Blackpool, the Labour leader jokingly told journalists they would “all cooperate” under his socialist government.

At his election launch event in Battersea last month, Mr Corbyn said a Labour government would go after “billionaire media barons like Rupert Murdoch”, saying his “empire pumps out propaganda to support a rigged system”.

And he added: “I ask our media as as good journalists to just report what we say.”

The Labour leader has also repeatedly been forced to ask his supporters to stop heckling journalists asking him difficult questions during press conferences.

Mr Corbyn has already pledged to “set free” journalists via a series of radical reforms to the industry, including giving them the right to “elect” their editors.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August last year, Mr Corbyn said he did not see journalists at his “enemies”, but instead claimed they were being “held back” by large news corporations.

He said: “The owners and editors of most of our country’s newspaper have dragged down standards so far that their hard working journalists are simply not trusted by the public…

“For all the worry about new forms of fakes news we’ve ignored the fact that most of our citizens think our newspapers churn out fake news day in, day out.”