n Trevor Hoyle
Jeremy Corbyn: the leader who never led With his own demise, he brought the Labour Party crashing down with him, snuffing out the last glimmer of hope for the UK
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was mad for Corbyn. Now I’m mad at him. From this distance, it’s hard to conjure up the heady atmosphere of excitement and promise of those 20 months between Corbyn becoming party leader and the general election of 2017. I went to hear him speak three times during that period. He’s not a great orator. He didn’t have to be. The people in the crowd were so grateful that at last there was a politician they could put their fragile faith in, a man who wasn’t just spouting words when he spoke about “compassion” and “caring” and “for the many not the few”. Despite his self-effacing, low-key style, he was greeted with genuine enthusiasm and rapturous applause; I hesitate to use the word “adulation” but it was close. The most memorable of these events was at the Lowry theatre in Salford Quays, now the gentrified nexus of what used to be the working port of the Manchester Ship Canal. There’s a large shopping mall, with bars and restaurants, the Lowry art gallery, and a
stone’s-throw across the waterway is MediaCity where the BBC northern news hub is based. I particularly remember this occasion because it was a sweltering hot Saturday afternoon and the theatre was packed: I was on the topmost tier, standing room only. It was also memorable, and highly unusual at a political rally, to find the older generation outnumbered by young people in their teens and twenties, even families with toddlers in buggies. Didn’t they have something better to do, on such a gorgeous afternoon, than cram into a stuffy crowded theatre? Apparently not. This was important to them. Anyway, with a bit of luck there’d be another sunshiny Lancashire weekend coming along next year or the year after. I’ve highlighted the Lowry event to give an idea of the grassroots fervour of working folk who’d probably never been to a political gathering in their lives, and as personal eye-witness testimony to Corbyn’s drawing power in those early days. Bear in mind also that Labour supporters were still
16 ColdType | Mid-April 2020 | www.coldtype.net
haunted by the grisly hangover of Ed Miliband’s leadership and the lacklustre 2015 election campaign.
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n his first general election as leader, called for 8 June 2017, Corbyn’s Labour started off 25 points behind the Tories in some opinion polls. Within weeks he cut that lead down until they were almost neck-and-neck. Even so, it was the general consensus that Theresa May would win by a landslide – a view shared by many Labour MPs, who thought Corbyn was a disaster waiting to happen. A final fond memory of the summer of 2017 is Glastonbury: Corbyn is on the bill, between Run the Jewels and Craig David. The cheering crowd breaks into an impromptu chorus of Oh Jeremy Corbyn … as he appears onstage, smiling and waving. Although he’d lost the election two weeks earlier, there is an air of celebration and the mood is buoyant. There was good reason for such optimism. Membership under Corbyn had surged to over half-a-
