‘Ah, Jeremy,’ remarked Tony Blair at a smart dinner party in Islington not long before he became prime minister, ‘he hasn’t made the journey.’ As it turned out, this was something of an understatement. And yet here we are, 20 years on, and the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn is leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is as if New Labour never happened. You couldn’t make it up.
How do we explain the miraculous rise of a man who, before he emerged blinking into daylight from the political shadows, had made not the merest ripple on the national consciousness? Who, despite more than 30 years in parliament, had rarely featured in the public prints or seen the inside of a television studio? A figure so marginal that during the 13 years of Labour government he voted against the official line a record 428 times?
If Rosa Prince is to believed, the rise of Corbyn is yet another of the unforeseen consequences arising from the invasion of Iraq.
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