Jeremy Corbyn Documentary: Why won't they just let me fail on my own?

The Jeremy Corbyn documentary with Vice 'reveals a tripartite existence of shame, adulation and paranoia

Vice news filmed Corbyn and his team for eight weeks for the documentary Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider

Of the various self-destructing seeds contained within socialism, the most fertile is its vulnerability to attack. When the survival of society depends on everyone believing in fairness and equality, you only need a few nasty capitalists and you’re in serious trouble. Hence, everywhere it has been tried, it has had to be upheld by a vast network of secret police that takes no chances. Pol Pot, to his credit, worked out that if you wore glasses, there was a strong chance you were too smart for him.

Capitalism is better at subsuming its enemies – it just lets them fail. Banksy put it best: “I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies. I mean, look how many cakes Michael Moore can afford.”

So with Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider, the documentary published by Vice News, it is right to turn first to the words of Gavin Sibthorpe, the Labour leader’s Official Wardrobe Malfunction Preventer who claims his "finest hour" in service of the nation’s best known semi-revolutionary socialist was dressing him up in white tie to meet the Queen.

Towards the end of Vice’s documentary Mr Sibthorpe was asked what he made of the Labour Party’s sizeable anti-Jeremy enemy within.

“The best thing to do would be wait and let Jeremy fail on his own,” he says. “I don’t think he will. But [let him] fail in his own time, you know. “

This, to Mr Sibthorpe’s credit, is ideologically pure. True Marxists know their burden is to wait for conditions to be right for revolution. Radical upstarts such as Lenin and Dan Jarvis should understand this better.

Vice’s "fly-on-the-wall" documentary took months to make. Flies are attracted to one thing, and whenever the smell coming off that thing turned so overwhelming as to be unmaskable even by the aggressively perfumed Seumas Milne, Vice was sent packing til the whiff had subsided.

After the notorious incident in which Mr Corbyn gave a statement on the Budget and failed to mention the fact that the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, had resigned over it, Vice was shown the door for almost a month.

And who can blame them? By this point, documentary-maker Ben Ferguson had shown himself to be a highly capable journalist, and as such could already have become just like the rest of the media, who are, in Jeremy’s words, “shallow, facile and ill-informed. They shape a debate that is baseless and narrow".

He could even have become as bad as Guardian columnist and author of “utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness” Jonathan Freedland, who is “not a nice guy at all” and “kind of obsessed with me, you know".

You might take the view that a Guardian columnist might be quite likely to take a particular interest in the leader of the Labour Party, but in fairness to Corbyn, he has similarly inventive views about the requirements of his own job, which is Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. Monday morning. Iain Duncan Smith has resigned. Team Corbyn are drafting their response. “It’s not for me to say,” he tells Milne, himself once a Guardian commentator with his obsessions of his own, “you know, that the Government is in a mess".

In terms of narrative structure, this was certainly the moment at which the lion leaps from the jumanji board. To witness what appeared to be eight grown adults performing peroral origami on a speech to which none of them added the word "Iain" or "Duncan" or "Smith" felt almost incriminating in its voyeurism. What right did we have to see this innermost sanctum of balls-ups? (Answer: None. After lunch, Vice was slung out).

“The Government is in a difficult position. It’s gone through one disastrous series of events after another,” explained Milne later, as if this was somehow an indicator of his own success.

Imagine that bin man off The X Factor ringing up his agent: “Prince is dead. We’re in with a chance now.”

Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider depicts, in essence, a tripartite existence. Being humiliated in the House of Commons and being restoratively mobbed by his obsessive band of supporters, bound together by the Machiavellian madness of his inner circle.

Later, while "very tired" after the local election results, he explains the party has lost a mere 29 council seats and not the feared 300, a result that is nevertheless unprecedented for any Opposition leader that has made it into Government. “We hung on. I’m very happy,” he says. “There is not one story that the BBC won’t spin into a negative story for me. It’s obsessive beyond belief.”

It’s all so unfair. Why won’t they just let him fail on his own?