Jeremy Corbyn has given up on winning this election and is currently struggling to ensure that on 12 December Boris Johnson will be denied a Commons majority. Last week Labour’s campaign strategy switched from trying to win seats to trying not to lose them, reflecting just how badly things are going. With polling day just around the corner, the party has been reduced to sending its chair Ian Lavery to visit once rock-sold northern seats to try and win back former miners to Labour.
It should not have been this way. Indeed, according to John McDonnell, Corbyn was just a week away from becoming Prime Minister in 2017. If only that election campaign had lasted just a little bit longer he would have entered Downing Street as the victor. Corbynites claim 2017 as a complete vindication of the man and his message. For a time, their giddy triumphalism knew no bounds, greeting the Labour leader at the party’s 2017 annual conference as ‘the absolute boy’ and chanting ‘ohhh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ to the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’.
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