Jeremy Corbyn, The New Labour Hero

Britain’s demoralised public and confused political flailings are sought to be given a spine of principled, socialist steel.

- Pranay Sharma

To the much-spoken-of Rightward lurch in politics every where, attested to by the rise of a whole roster of hard-hat figures across the globe, there is a corollary. There was a time, not too long ago, when a Bernie Sanders campaign would have been unthinkable on the American landscape. And now, there is the Englishman with a beard that’s been equally derided and good-naturedly feted. Jeremy Corbyn, till the other day, would have been seen as a politician so far out on the left as to be simply unviable. But here we are in the summer of 2017, with Labour pulling up just a whisker or two away from a majority in a snap poll and young supporters greeting him everywhere with a joyous pop anthem, a reworked version of Seven Nation Army.

The arrival of Corbyn as a serious pol­itician, a stunning makeover during the course of which he won over many scep­tics, was marked by the unexpected results thrown up in the recent parlia­mentary polls. In a sense, it had to do with the logic of the times—the anxie­ties over Brexit, a general gloominess. But it’s the way he was able to harness the dissipated energies coursing thro­ugh a nation that made the headlines, even if he came up short. “The way he had grown during the campaign—in self­belief and oratorical ability and all manner of other qualities—was remark­ able,” wrote Stephen Moss, a self­ adm­itted former sceptic, in The Guardian.