THE SEXPOT TROT

Why are women so fascinated by the man who could destroy Labour?

The PEACE and quiet of a North London allotment was punctuated by the constant ringing of a mobile telephone last weekend. The gardener fielding the calls has tended the same patch of east Finchley for years. Until a few weeks ago he worked quietly, harvesting fruit for his home-made jams and digging up produce for vegetarian dinners with his wife at home.

But i n recent days he’s had more important things on his mind than strawberry compotes and courgette curries.

For Jeremy Corbyn has surged to the front in the Labour leadership race, to the deep consternation of his rivals.

Private polls this week showed him opening up a 20-point lead over Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, who moved into second place ahead of the former favourite Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary.

As the bookies make Corbyn the favourite to win, some Labour MPs want Burnham and Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate who is trailing the field, to make a tactical withdrawal to stop a Leftist rout.

Corbyn’s popularity with the union brotherhood was already taken for granted because of his extreme politics. Only yesterday, Unison, the secondlargest union, joined the largest, Unite, in backing the MP for Islington North.

Inevitably, his lead in the polls and Trotskyite views are prompting comparisons between him and Michael Foot, who led Labour to its worst post- war election defeat in 1983.

Foot was 67 when he became leader; Corbyn is 66. They both backed scrapping Trident, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. Foot, like Corbyn, wanted greater state control of the banks.

And Foot’s 1983 manifesto, dubbed the longest ‘political suicide note in history’ by the Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman, demanded t he renationalisation of British Telecom and British Aerospace. Now, Corbyn is calling for the energy and rail companies to be taken back into state- ownership.

But Foot had at least been a long-serving Cabinet minister. Corbyn has never progressed beyond the backbenches.

Despite his inexperience, however, he is proving popular with party members, who admire his unspun approach to politics.

FAR from being deterred by his dishevelled appearance and ageing wardrobe of beige jackets and Lenin caps, they find him a refreshing change to the image- and spin-obsessed elite who have dominated the Labour hierarchy since the Blair years. Corbyn’s appeal goes still further. On the parenting website Mumsnet, the teetotaller is an unlikely sex symbol, with mothers expressing their admiration for his ‘ world-weary sea- dog look’ and his ‘passion’ for socialism.

his revelation that he buys the white vests he wears under his shirts ‘ on the holloway road in North London on a market stall’ led female admirers to post mocked-up pictures of him dressed only in his underwear.

So what is it about this oldfashioned ideologue that some women find so beguiling?

Corbyn may not seem an obvious pin-up, any more than he seemed a serious contender to lead his party, but he has l ong had a reputation as a ‘ladies’ man’. he is on his third marriage, which is highly unusual for an MP seeking to be Prime Minister.

he married his first wife, Jane Chapman, an academic, in 1974. They were both councillors in North London, and she described Corbyn as ‘her political soulmate’, but they split in 1979 after she tired of being treated second best to his politics. As her husband had devoted ‘100 per cent’ to his work, there wasn’t much left for her, she said at the time.

his second marriage, in 1987, was to fiery Chilean campaigner Claudia Bracchitta, an interior designer whose striking good looks and innate style seemed rather at odds with a husband whose wardrobe appeared as outdated as his Left-wing ideology.

They had three sons, but Corbyn’s devotion to his politics would again sour his relationship.

After 12 years of marriage, it emerged that Ms Bracchitta had decided to send the couple’s eldest son to a grammar school nine miles from the family home.

Corbyn, who is strongly opposed to educational selection, wanted the boy to go the failing local comprehensive. his stance reeked of hypocrisy as Corbyn himself went to Adams’ Grammar school in Newport, Shropshire, and his mother, Naomi, taught maths at a grammar school. his father, David, was an engineer.

Yet though Ms Bracchitta won the argument over their son’s schooling, she lost her husband.

In a statement, she explained: ‘My children’s education is my absolute priority. The decision (to send Ben to grammar school) was made by myself alone and without the consent of my husband. The difficulties of making decisions under these circumstances have played an important role in bringing about a regrettable marital break-up.’

Corbyn’s brother, Piers, once a member of the Communist Party, suggested there may have been additional pressures. Asked if his brother was unfaithful to his wife, Piers — who now runs a weather forecasting business — said: Something like that must have been going on when they finally split up, but I don’t know who was bad first.’

Today, even 16 years after the divorce, Corbyn is still sensitive over the grammar school issue. he pulled out of a major TV interview this week when he was told that he would be asked about his son’s education.

Corbyn’s affections have, meanwhile, moved on to 46-year- old Laura Alvarez, whom he married in her native Mexico two years ago.

She shares her husband’s zeal for Left- wing politics and imports Fairtrade coffee from her homeland. The couple live in a £620,000 terrace house in Finsbury Park, a grittily fashionable enclave of North-West London, not far from the Kinnocks. Throughout all the turbulence in his private life, Jeremy Corbyn has remained resolutely committed to his one abiding passion: traditional socialism.

The political commentator Leo McKinstry, who was assistant secretary of Islington North Labour Party in the eighties, said: ‘Corbyn has never seen a Left-wing campaign he did not like, nor a capitalist enterprise he did not despise. he was a teenager at the height of the Sixties rebellion movement and has never grown out of that mindset.’

And it is this that has made him the darling of the union barons.

To his admirers, Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a tireless fighter against injustice. A vice - chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he is in the vanguard of the opposition to austerity and a staunch republican who once asked Tony Blair to evict the royal Family from Buckingham Palace.

EVEN before he became an MP, in 1983, he was upsetting the party leadership: in 1981 he led the calls for the purge of soft-Left MPs such as Neil Kinnock for failing to back his own hard-Left hero, Tony Benn, in the Labour leadership contest.

Significantly, Corbyn was an early disciple of ralph Miliband, the late Marxist historian and father of ed Miliband. In the eighties, Miliband senior instigated a discussion group which met every Sunday at Tony Benn’s London house. Corbyn was a leading participant. And, like Miliband senior, Corbyn is an avowed enemy of big business. At meetings of his local Labour Party, her eceives the biggest cheers for his rallying cry: ‘Our job is not to reform capitalism. Our job is to abolish capitalism.’

To his many detractors in Labour, however, he is a dangerous, wide- eyed ideologue who, for more than 30 years, has embraced every discredited Marxist regime from hugo Chavez in Venezuela to Fidel Castro in Cuba. ‘The survival of Cuba is an inspiration to the poorest,’ he said in a recent blog.

Indeed, as a serial rebel, he has defied the party leadership more than 550 times in the past decade — which makes his presence on the leadership ballot paper all the more ironic.

The popular explanation is that moderate Labour MPs lent him their initial support, even though they had no intention of voting for him, because they wanted a ‘broader debate’.

Yet to their dismay, Corbyn has been the star performer in a series of hustings. he impresses with his fluency and ability to speak without notes — the legacy of years spent attending hundreds of public protest meetings.

Before politics, he spent two years in Jamaica doing voluntary work and was a full-time union organiser after a short-lived degree course in trade unionism at North London Polytechnic.

his brother Piers said: ‘ Jeremy had his studies terminated because he had arguments with the people in charge. he probably knew more than them.’

That same combative streak has not served him so well when confronted by seasoned interviewers in front of TV cameras.

earlier this month, Corbyn lost his temper when he was challenged by Channel 4 presenter Krishnan Guru- Murthy over his support for the murderous Palestinian militant terrorist groups hezbollah and hamas.

In truth, Corbyn has always specialised in militant causes. In 1984, as a long-time comrade of Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, he invited two convicted IRA terrorists to the Commons only days after the bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton,

which killed five people attending the Tory Party conference.

And he provoked outrage at a ‘ Troops Out’ of Northern Ireland meeting in 1987 when he stood in silence for a minute to honour eight IRA terrorists who had been shot dead by the SAS.

More recently, he has spoken in support of Islamic extremists. He backs the infamous hate-preacher Raed Salah, the leader of Israel’s Islamic Movement, who has served two prison sentences or assaulting a police officer and fundraising for Hamas. It’s no wonder one party whip used to refer to the MP as ‘Jeremy Cor Bin-Laden’.

Alan Johnson, the former Labour Home Secretary, has been particularly withering in his criticism of Corbyn.

He has said: ‘As the most Left-wing candidate, you [Corbyn] should get my vote, but you won’t because Labour’s best traditions include anti-fascism and internationalism while your support — to me, inexplicable and shameful — for the fascistic and anti-Semitic forces of Hezbollah and Hamas flies in the face of those traditions.

‘In particular, your full-throated cheerleading for the vicious anti-Semitic Islamist Raed Salah is a deal-breaker . . . he is not a “critic of Israel”, but a straightup Jew-hater.’

Yet the man who has spent his Parliamentary life opposing careerist politicians is now seeking the prize of the leadership. Even if he finishes second or third, Jeremy Corbyn would be entitled to a place in the shadow cabinet.

It’s clear that Labour has a crisis on its hands. The unions have already driven Labour onto the electoral rocks by electing Ed Miliband instead of his elder brother, David.

Are they about to witness the crowning of the man whom the Tories are every bit as eager as the Red Barons to see as Leader of the Opposition?

Five weeks ago, that would have seemed like little more than a joke. No one’s laughing now.