Snap, crackle, pop. He could have been selling organic breakfast cereal

THE Jeremy Corbyn souvenir stand seemed to be missing a trick. T-shirts for sale - but no vests. Never mind. I decided to buy a T-shirt anyway.

“Are you waged?” asked the woman behind the stand pleasantly.

I was.

“That’ll be £15 then, please,” she said. “If you’ve not got a job, it’s a tenner.”

Ten-pound T-shirts for the unemployed. More than 13 per cent of your week’s dole money. Perhaps capitalism has less to fear from Jeremy Corbyn than it thought.

Middlesbrough Town Hall was the venue for what the new darling of the Left said was the 75th event of his Labour leadership campaign so far.

There were 800 seats - all full. Quite something, for 4pm on a rainy Tuesday. And it wasn’t his only rally of the day, either - a few hours later he was due to address 1,100 people in Newcastle.

Mr Corbyn’s rallies have become the talk of politics. The size of the crowds. The feverish excitement. The numbers of young people. And, true enough, there were a fair few teenage faces among the Middlesbrough congregation, waiting pale and eager for their improbable hero.

He shuffled on stage to thrilled applause. He applauded back. “Thank you for inviting us!” he beamed bashfully. (He always says “we” and “us” where any other public figure would say “I” and “me”.)

He began by protesting, in his gently frowning way, against “the political class”, who form their policies at “the dining tables of the elite”. (Mr Corbyn is unlikely to be caught at an elite dining table. His first wife has reported that a staple of his diet was cold baked beans, straight from the tin.)

He moved on to bankers with their “telephone number bonuses”, and the “very rich” who selfishly “salt their money away” so that it’s “no good to anybody” (except presumably them). Then there was the Government’s “abominable” Welfare Bill. “I’m sorry,” he cried, “but it’s wrong!” (Mr Corbyn has a very British way of making “sorry” sound like the angriest word in the world.)

In the past week I’ve watched campaign speeches by Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Their audiences, barely a 10th the size of Mr Corbyn’s, clapped dutifully. Mr Corbyn’s thundered.

Questions from the floor. Mr Corbyn addressed each at length and with clerk-like solemnity. One man sitting to the left of the stage protested that no one from his side of the hall had been called to ask a question. “Discrimination against the left!” cried Mr Corbyn, in a possibly unique moment of levity.

After an hour, time was up. His parting words were exquisitely Corbynian. “If you work together, and are inclusive,” he declared, “it makes for a great feeling!” It sounded a little as if he were advertising an organic breakfast cereal. But his people knew what he meant.