Jeremy Corbyn faceless no more

He accepted the nomination in a spirit of honourable self-sacrifice: the leftwing of the Labour Party had to have someone to vote for – and it wasn’t as if there were any chance of his winning!

In less than 48 hours, the world will know whether Jeremy Corbyn has won or lost. There will be many, still, who scratch their heads and say: ‘‘Jeremy who?’’

And why not? Until the unexpectedly savage defeat of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party in the recent British general election, the identity of the MP for the London seat of Islington North was known to very few people outside of … well … Islington North. And even among those who have regularly returned him to Westminster since 1983, only a handful would have picked their MP – a bewhiskered, 66-year-old, self-proclaimed socialist by the name of Jeremy Corbyn – as Ed Miliband’s most likely successor.

That his name appears on the ballot paper at all is, like so many other aspects of his candidacy, a virtual accident. Other better known left-wing flagbearers had already been approached and who had declined before Corbyn said yes. He accepted the nomination in a spirit of honourable selfsacrifice: the left-wing of the Labour Party had to have someone to vote for – and it wasn’t as if there were any chance of his winning! Hah! The Germans would blame it on the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times. Others would say that Corbyn’s candidacy only took off when Labour’s interim leader, Harriet Harman, urged her colleagues to join the Tories in putting the boot into Britain’s already bruised and battered beneficiaries. His hard-line leftwing comrades would merrily opine that there has always been a massive constituency for Corbyn’s simple socialist message, but until he came along, no one had quite mastered the knack of communicating it effectively. Whatever the explanation, the brute fact of the contest for Miliband’s replacement was indisputable: the moment Labour audiences saw and heard Corbyn, they fell head over heels in love with him.

And no one in the British punditocracy could work out why. It wasn’t as if Corbyn were especially telegenic. (Dear Lord – that beard!) Nor was he an especially gifted speaker. And the nonsensical things he was saying: Who could possibly take such antiquated socialist sloganeering seriously? Certainly not his rivals for the leadership: lynx-eyed Yvette Cooper; bluff and blokey Andy Burnham; the ambitiously lissom Liz Kendall. Those three all looked completely at home in the Labour Party Tony Blair had made. The party that no longer believed in ‘‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’’. The party that had allowed Blair to lead it into the crime that was Iraq.

But that was just it! Corbyn had never swallowed a drop of the Blairite Kool-Aid. He still believed in common ownership. He’d voted against going into Iraq. He was, 32 years after being elected to the House of Commons, the same unashamed socialist he’d always been. And when the TV interviewers asked him questions about where he’d like to take Britain, he answered them. Without the benefit of pollsters, or spin-doctors, he talked about renationalising the railways, reanimating the trade unions, restoring the NHS. Cooper, Kendall and Burnham were dumbfounded. The pundits were nonplussed. The Blairite faction was, very publicly, appalled. But Labour’s members and supporters just couldn’t get enough.

The people who now find themselves vilified as the opponents of ‘‘jez we can!’’ Corbymania should have seen it coming. But not only did they fail to grasp the meaning of the emergence of left-wing populist parties across Europe, they also (and quite wilfully) refused to comprehend the meaning of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) near clean-sweep of Labour seats north of the border.

The SNP ran on an antiausterity platform, positioning itself well to the left of Labour. But their crushing victory was about a lot more than that. By optimistically orienting themselves towards the future, and promising the Scots that it would be a future they determined, the SNP unleashed that most potent of all political forces: hope.

Corbyn’s authenticity and simplicity have encouraged similar hopefulness among the English. As the leadership campaign drew to a close this week, Corbyn’s campaign team estimated he had taken his message, face to face, to more than 50,000 people. Literally hundredsof-thousands more have paid Labour £3 for the right to participate in the leadership vote. The polls predict a Corbyn win on the first ballot.

If that happens, it will no longer be a case of ‘‘Jeremy who?’’ But of ‘‘Jeremy what now?’’