Corbyn’s problem was not that the media hated him – but that he hated the media

On the morning of the election, we buried my lovely mum. I write this 24 hours later, now on a flight to the States, with the mud from her graveside still all over my shoes. This was just the ashes, because we had the funeral six weeks ago, but it was oddly fitting. The 1970 election was called a week before she married my father, who would go on to spend the bulk of his working life as a Tory MP, which meant they had to postpone their honeymoon and spend it canvassing the streets of Edinburgh instead. Four years later, the sudden second 1974 poll was held two days before the birth of my older sister. And there we were, right at the end, doing it to her yet again. She hadn’t talked much for the past few years, because multiple sclerosis can be savage like that. Still, if I close my eyes, I can very easily picture her rolling hers.

It was at another funeral this year that I met Jeremy Corbyn. He was a beloved friend of my own beloved friend Jeremy Hardy, and I can’t ever think of him, or write of him, without remembering it. Putting aside all else, a striking thing about this last election is that the best Corbyn, the twinkling, sparkling, genial, comfortable Corbyn, never quite made an appearance. He’s always in there somewhere, and it’s not just his friends who know it. Mad strangers spot it, too, and write poems about him on the internet.

Whose fault was that? They had a section on the Today programme a couple of days before the election in which they interspersed an ad-libbed bit from a speech he gave to supporters in Carlisle — where he broke off and started chatting about Iain Duncan Smith to a voter’s dog — with the snappy, charmless, irritated answers he gave in that BBC debate to Nick Robinson.