Corbyn can be beaten – here’s how

The Tory party is suffering from an intellectual crisis of confidence. Before 8 June, its collective view was that Jeremy Corbyn was simply too left-wing to be a serious candidate for the prime ministership in modern Britain. He hadn’t learnt the lessons of Labour’s defeats in the 1980s, and while he might excite a noisy 35 per cent of the electorate, thought the Tories, he’d never be able to put together a general election-winning coalition.

Corbyn, however, came closer to victory than any Tory had expected. His Labour party got 40 per cent of the vote and took seats off the Tories. Not one of them had seen it coming and, a month on, they are still trying to come to terms with what happened. They are wondering whether they got the electorate wrong, whether their campaigning approach can work in the modern era and if austerity (even they now use this pejorative word for balancing the books) should just be abandoned.