The hero of Glastonbury

Glastonbury this year boasted more than 2,000 acts, including world-famous headliners such as Radiohead and Ed Sheeran, said Hannah Ellis-petersen in The Guardian. But judging by the T-shirts, the flags and the chants, “the man of the hour was the Labour Party’s 68-year-old leader”. Jeremy Corbyn appeared on the main Pyramid Stage on Saturday, and he “gave the gathering exactly what it wanted”, said Simon Kelner in the i newspaper. “He rattled through some of his crowd-pleasers about peace, love and the environment,” and ended his set with a bit of Shelley that brought the house down, calling on the masses to “rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number”. Thousands responded with the festival’s most popular chant: “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”, sung to the tune of Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes.

Only Corbyn could “speak at Glastonbury and think he was addressing the oppressed proletariat”, said Ross Clark on his Spectator blog. The festival, he declared, shows “that another world is possible if we come together”. In fact, it shows “what is possible when the middle classes pay £238 a head and drive down to Somerset in their VWS, packed with glamping tents and Cath Kidston wellies”. As Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson once pointed out, Glastonbury is “the most bourgeois thing on the planet”. No wonder Corbyn appeals to the festival crowd, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail: he’s “an eternal student politician, a firebrand fantasist who has never actually had to operate in the real world of politics”. Labour, once the voice of the worker, is now the party of “England’s well-to-do revolutionaries”. Be fair, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. Nearly 13 million people voted for Labour on 8 June; not many of them were “wellheeled bohemian radicals”. As a matter of fact, Labour’s support was highest among young workingclass voters. That he has won many more affluent people too is not “symptomatic of failure: it is a sign of success”. For years, Labour was criticised for failing to break out of its industrial heartlands. Corybn has shown that “socialism can convince middle-class and working-class voters alike”.

Still, there is a basic mismatch between Corbyn and many of his new supporters, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times; between what some MPS call the “Leninists” – his hard-left comrades – and the “John Lennonists”, the idealists who are attracted to his message of change. On Europe, for instance, the Labour leader is, unlike his young supporters, “instinctively hostile to the EU”, which he sees as a “capitalist plot”. Corbyn is riding a wave, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. But he still has a long way to go. Labour recorded a 2% swing from the Tories at the election. To win even a tiny majority, he would need a “further swing of 6%”. If he is ever actually to take power, he must do something very difficult: “win votes, seats and arguments in the centre ground of British politics”.