Corbyn’s Labour Party rallies behind a man starting to look like a winner
Voters see the UK opposition leader as having more sound judgment than the prime minister
When Jeremy Corbyn looks out at the sea of ecstatic delegates assembled for his leader’s speech at Labour’s conference in Brighton on Wednesday, he could be forgiven for pinching himself to make sure that the past 12 roller-coaster months have not been a dream.
The Economist has just featured him on its front page, dubbing Mr Corbyn, 68, “The Likely Lad” and concluding that he is “Britain’s most likely next prime minister”.
His party is beating Theresa May’s Conservatives in opinion polls, and Labour stands more united behind its leader than it has for years.
The party was in desperate shape when it held its annual conference in Liverpool last year after a bitter and destructive leadership struggle that followed a coup attempt against Mr Corbyn by a majority of his MPs, furious at a perceived lack of support from him during the campaign to stay in the EU.
Mr Corbyn survived the crisis, re-elected with a crushing majority by the party’s rank and file, but relations with the parliamentary arm remained abysmal.
Mrs May, who took over unopposed as Tory leader and prime minister after the vote for Brexit, appeared to be impregnable. Labour was flatlining in the opinion polls, as support for the party as whole and for Mr Corbyn reached levels unseen since Michael Foot, a similarly left-wing leader, took it to an electoral disaster in 1983.
It was no great surprise when on April 18, Mrs May called a general election to be held less than two months later. Politicians and journalists of all hues began to write Mr Corbyn’s obituaries.
But then, despite a drubbing in local elections on May 4, Mr Corbyn and his followers enacted a political revolution.
The Labour leader stormed around the country presenting a manifesto that targeted falling standards in public services such as health care and education and chimed with the millions who had spent seven years of Tory and coalition rule under a programme of austerity.
Mr Corbyn’s message was spread by thousands of activists and by a party operation revitalised by the hundreds of thousands of members who had joined since he became leader after the 2015 election. The party’s brilliantly planned and executed social media campaign spoke directly to voters through their mobile phones and computers.
While Labour was fighting the election with 21st-century tools, Mrs May made appearances at a succession of what appeared to be out-of-town service depots, where she parroted a line that will forever haunt her, about the “strong and stable” future she would ensure the country.
Her great gamble failed as the Tories lost seats and were denied a majority in the Commons, and Labour gained 30 MPs and ended with 262 seats.
Despite leading the party to its third consecutive defeat, Mr Corbyn had achieved a vote share of 40 per cent with an avowedly socialist programme, which had seemed impossible when the party was in the low 20s. More importantly, his triumph gave him control of Labour as past critics, with degrees of sincerity and enthusiasm, bent the knee to the leader.
Less than a week after the poll came the Grenfell tragedy, when upwards of 80 people died in an inferno at a tower of social housing flats in an area of west London where rich and poor exist side by side.
The view of an unequal Britain that Mr Corbyn had preached on the campaign trail could not have been more horrifically illustrated; many believed that the residents of the tower had died because they were poor.
The day after the disaster, Mrs May and Mr Corbyn visited the scene. The Labour leader looked prime ministerial as he hugged residents and walked among the community, clearly moved, while the actual prime minister was heavily guarded and escorted around stiffly by senior police officers.
This bizarre inversion of roles has been reinforced in the three months since the election. Mr Corbyn has been feted wherever he has gone; the prime minister has seemed cold and aloof. Their relative ratings in opinion polls have also flipped, with 40 per cent of respondents viewing Mr Corbyn as being of sound judgment compared with 36 per cent for Mrs May, a swing of 15 per cent in his favour.
Whether his success reflects a post-Trump rejection of populism or a reassuring rebuttal of the political truth that voices outside the establishment view will not appeal to the electorate, Mr Corbyn has injected excitement and uncertainty into the British body politic, for better or worse.