Corbyn could win this election. But only if he promises to step down after seeing through a second referendum

The solitary way he can seriously shift the momentum is by preemptively consenting to the one thing that will win the electorate over

If Jeremy Corbyn wants to deprive Boris Johnson of a majority and form a minority government, he has a narrow but viable path.

It is one no prospective leader has taken before. It would be as spectacular as unprecedented. It might fail, though I believe it would work.

It would be a binding promise to the electorate best reserved, for maximum impact, for his opening remarks at Friday night’s live debate with Johnson (assuming the yellow-bellied wretch shows up). It would run vaguely on these lines:

“Tonight, my fellow citizens, I want to begin with a statement that isn’t easy or pleasant to make. But it has become clear to me that much of the electorate neither likes nor trusts me.

“Whether that is fair or not, it’s a fact of political life. I am now the primary obstacle between you and a Labour government committed to protecting your interests in every crucial area, from Brexit and the NHS to the justice system and climate change.

“I did not go into politics to become the key enabler of a right-wing cabal of chancers and charlatans that will make the lives of the poor bleaker than ever, and of the struggling even harder.

“I haven’t spent 40 years campaigning for social justice to usher in a government that will leave the homeless dying in doorways, restrict the opportunities of the unprivileged young, asset strip the health service and sell off parts to Donald Trump, or entrench the obscene disparity in wealth that stops the hard-working affording decent housing and leaves them needing food banks to feed their children.

“So, painful as this is, I give you this pledge. If the outcome of the election permits me to form an administration, I will serve only for as long as required to see through a second referendum on EU membership. After that, I will remain in office for the few weeks until a successor is chosen.

“Contrary to what you might have read in certain newspapers, I love this country. I love it for all its faults and glaring injustices. I love the values of fairness, tolerance and equity to which the Tory governments of the last decade have barely paid lip service, and which are under greater threat now than at any time since 1945. I love it enough to regard my career a tiny price to protect it from the ravages the Conservatives will inflict.”

That brief declaration would, I suspect, spell the end of not one prospective PM, but two.

From the urban marginals Johnson must take off Labour to get a majority, the story from the doorsteps is the same. It isn’t primarily Brexit that is depressing the Labour vote. It isn’t a manifesto which, for all the scepticism about its deliverability, the punters seem to like.

It’s Corbyn. The personal, more than in living memory, is the political.

It counts for nothing whether this is fair. You could blame him for dithering so disastrously over antisemitism, and for the buttock-splintering Brexit fence-sitting. You can blame certain newspapers and, more heartbreakingly, the BBC for betraying the fundamental duty to hold a sitting PM to account.

When the BBC finally did its job, for half an hour on Sunday morning, the blinding obviousness of Johnson’s inadequacies could have cauterised a retina from 20 paces.

Even if it was the wrong Andrew, even Marr was up to exposing the venality and mendacity of a creature whose reflex response to a mourning father’s plea not to politicise his son’s death was to unleash the usual barrage of glib falsehoods to do just that.

But what matters now isn’t why a public that unexpectedly warmed to Corbyn two and a half years ago has taken such a loathing. All that matters is that it has, and that we are are 10 days from it deciding the election.

This game isn’t over yet. The polls have unmistakably narrowed. There is room for Labour to squeeze the Lib Dems by another couple of points. The dramatic surge in late registration offers some hope that the young will get off their arses on 12 December in numbers unseen for decades. Tactical voting may help.

So there is no guarantee that Johnson will get the majority he will need given the DUP’s antipathy for sticking his “oven-ready” in the microwave.

But with Labour canvassers in traditionally solid northern and west Midlands seats in despair at what they are hearing about their leader, it remains the likeliest outcome in the betting markets by a factor of two to one.

Assuming the current Conservative lead is 7-10 points, this election remains on a knife edge. Making accurate predictions from raw national figures is virtually impossible given wild regional variations and the difficulty of factoring tactical voting into the model.

But a semi-educated guess is that while a lead in that range would give Johnson a small to medium majority, if it shrunk to 3-4 points, Corbyn would go favourite to form a government.

It is way too late for him to effect that sort of late swing by changing perceptions. A country that was agnostic about him in 2017 has become militantly atheistic in the Dawkins mould. Corbyn will no doubt win Friday’s debate by most metrics, and it will at best make a fractional difference.

The solitary way he can seriously shift the momentum is by preemptively consenting to euthanasia that could cement his place in history as a hero of socialism. If he trusts to luck, and marches onward, onward and into the valley of death, he will be remembered as the brutalist right wing’s most useful idiot.