After five years, we’ve finally come to the end of the Jeremy Corbyn project

The mark that this unexpected Labour leader really leaves is to remind us that elections are fought in primary colours, writes John Rentoul

The unexpected leader had many highs and lows during his tenure (Getty)

No, Labour did not “win the argument” at the 2019 election, and no, Jeremy Corbyn was not “proved absolutely right” by the government’s response to the economic consequences of coronavirus. But the outgoing Labour leader has left more of a mark on Britain than some of his detractors allow.

As one of his detractors, I should know. He overturned my assumptions about politics. I assumed that he could not win the Labour leadership. I thought that Labour members, having experimented with comfort-blanket old-leftism under Ed Miliband, would not respond to losing by doubling their bet.

I accepted I was wrong with as much humility as I could – but then I assumed Corbyn could not win a general election. This was a more fundamental mistake. He didn’t win, but he came close enough to prove that he could have done. Another 10 seats lost by the Conservatives in 2017 and Corbyn would have been prime minister. I do not think that would have worked out well. I think Corbyn by his character is unsuited to any form of executive office, and he would have been the prisoner of an unstable coalition of non-Corbynite Labour MPs and Scottish nationalists.

However, I also believe that any assessment of Corbyn and Corbynism that ignores the 2017 election is worthless. I do not agree with my fellow Blairites, such as Tony Blair himself and his successor as MP for Sedgefield, Phil Wilson, when they say that people voted for Corbyn three years ago because they thought he couldn’t win. The important thing is that they voted for him; if the election had been a week later, he would have been prime minister.

All the reasons that rendered him unfit for office in my view failed to prevent 41 per cent of my fellow citizens from voting for him. His worldview shading into conspiracy theories and antisemitism; his punk Marxist economics; his temperament: none of that was the absolute obstacle to winning an election that so many of us assumed it would be.

It is not only Corbyn who has confounded those assumptions in recent years. The election of Donald Trump also showed that many of the qualities that were expected to render him unelectable were precisely those that could be turned to his advantage. Politics is a cruder business than many of us who follow it closely often think.

People liked Corbyn because he plainly believed in something. In the 2017 campaign he came across as a kindly person saying reasonable, even platitudinous, things – at odds with the image of the terrorist-apologist ideologue as painted by the Tory press. (Most of what the Tory press reported about him was accurate, in fact, but most voters did not have time for the details.)

Of course, Theresa May ran a shocking campaign, and Corbyn benefited from Remain voters judging correctly that a vote for Labour was the best chance of stopping Brexit. But there was also the positive appeal of a manifesto that said: “To hell with fiscal responsibility; let’s spend loads more on public services. PS Renationalise the railways.” You only have to see what Boris Johnson put in the Tory manifesto – 50,000 more nurses; 20,000 more police – last year to see how that caught the public mood.

However, Corbyn was not just absurd and vain in claiming that Rishi Sunak’s response to the coronavirus shutdown of the economy vindicated his policy; he was wrong. The chancellor was following the consensus around the world – among mostly centre-right governments, because there aren’t any left-wing ones – that they should respond to economic shocks by pumping borrowed cash into the economy.

No one advocates such a policy in normal times, and to be fair to Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell, they didn’t.

The 2019 Labour manifesto promised a huge increase in public spending, but it was to be paid for by a huge increase in taxation. The scale of the tax rises, £1 for every £7 currently raised, was implausible, but that was the policy. It was only after the manifesto and its costings document were published that McDonnell added a further £55bn to women’s pensions, which had to come out of borrowing because there were no more taxes – however implausible – to raise.

What Corbyn might have meant, I suppose, is that his argument against “austerity” will be relevant in the next phase, as politicians struggle to return the economy to normality.

That is where the consensus broke down in the UK after the 2008 financial crash, with David Cameron and George Osborne arguing for a quicker return to balancing the books than Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. (Nick Clegg agreed with Labour but changed his mind after the 2010 election produced a hung parliament.)

Corbyn thinks he “won” the argument against “austerity” even though he lost the vote last year. This seems confused. If anyone “won” the economic argument of the last decade, it was Brown and Darling, whose less stringent path to fiscal responsibility might have saved some of the damage to the social fabric.

It was their approach that was opportunistically annexed by Johnson last year, proposing a modest expansion of public services, in contrast to the vast “tax and nationalise” programme advocated by Corbyn.

In any case, the legacy to which Corbyn lays claim – that Labour governments might, on the whole, tax, spend and borrow more than Conservative ones – is not quite the revolutionary change he thinks it is.

The mark he really leaves is to remind us that elections are fought in primary colours, and that forms of politics that seem simplistic can cut through. Trump said he would build a wall; after three years and no wall, it is still a message to which American voters respond. Corbyn condemned the New Labour years as merely a milder form of Thatcherism; ahistorical nonsense, but it struck a chord.

We Blairites did not see how New Labour’s success had become oppressive, inhibiting new thinking, and how its promoters had become the establishment. No party can be successful for too long, but the Conservatives are better at adapting. Note how, even in the middle of this crisis, Johnson adopted “there is such a thing as society” – David Cameron’s rejection of Thatcherism – in order to cast himself as a One Nation leader capable of bringing the country together.

There had to be a reaction against Blair, and it is unfair to criticise Corbyn for trashing Labour leaders who went before him when Blair built New Labour as an “entirely new party”, rejecting everything that came before him.

But, unlike Blair, Corbyn leaves no tangible achievements behind. Only a warning to the centre-left as it rebuilds, that it needs simple messages and to take nothing for granted.