Jeremy Corbyn has an advantage you don’t often hear about in the mainstream media: a direct connection with Labour Party members and an ability to draw large crowds, quite often out of thin air.
I pointed this out a few months before the last UK general election campaign started. Three weeks before polling day I suggested that Labour’s prospects were much better than was widely assumed. Quoting Tony’s ‘Something’s Coming’ song in ‘West Side Story’ I argued that an undercurrent in British politics was being missed. The article ended with:
We are in uncertain times, but with Theresa May having called an election on the back of a working majority, anything less than a fifty-seat majority will look a poor result for her. As I ended last September’s column: Jeremy Corbyn may be with us for a quite a long time yet.
Depriving the Conservative Party of an overall majority caught most pundits by surprise. It has certainly had an extraordinary effect on what has happened since, not least in making an early election inevitable.
