Those weeks of winter had felt unusually bright. The air was crisp, blue sky cold and with cirrus stretched across it. You saw your breath in front of you. One evening, canvassing in Putney, the chill rain did what it had long threatened to and finally turned to hail. The wind blew, hard, sending away the last of autumn, where trees were sketched dark and bare as if in lines of black charcoal. Weather moved in, the country recorded consecutive records in wind power generation from those offshore turbines that now adorned the coast.
The people went to work, as had long been promised, and in great number they took to the streets. It feels somehow cliché to speak of how spirited their faces were, lifted up, what optimism was there. But it was true. The hopes of an at the time unelected prime minister, that winter would keep Labour campaigners indoors, went pulled apart with the cirrus. The country spoke to one another. People left their cities, left their boroughs, left their better-to-do towns, returned to places they’d once called home, found people still bravely holding the fort. Some of them called themselves ‘socialists’, others didn’t see the need to, but in truth it didn’t really matter.
Once the view had been that the election – whatever came about – might have been the end of something: the close of an experiment, “the Corbyn Project”. Again, it didn’t really matter what you called it. It was clear that wasn’t to be the case, you felt the surety in every interaction; that something outside the regular political structures had been built and the builders were ready to build more.
