Would you want Nigel Farage to marry your daughter?

The opposite of attraction is repulsion. Political commentary gives too little attention to a party’s (or leader’s) capacity to repel. Attractiveness to some may itself inspire disgust in others, simultaneously lifting support yet imposing a ceiling upon how high.

Here’s a quiz. Our last five elections have seen Labour and the Conservatives slugging it out for primacy, each election leaving one of them the loser. It is upon the losers that I wish to focus. Here, from those five results, are the raw (rounded) totals of votes cast, nationwide, for the loser in each case. I want you to guess which party leader lost which election, so I’ve ranked the totals in decreasing order of magnitude so you can’t tell which loser garnered which of the following five harvests: 12.9 million, 10.3 million, 9.3 million, 8.8 million and 8.6 million.

The general elections are: 2005 (Blair vs Howard); 2010 (Brown vs Cameron); 2015 (Cameron vs Miliband); 2017 (May vs Corbyn); 2019 (Johnson vs Corbyn). Any guesses which loser got the most votes?

Jeremy Corbyn easily wins the losers’ popularity race. The first election, in which he stood against Theresa May (2017), yielded Labour nearly 13 million votes. In Corbyn’s second election (2019) he fell back to some ten million votes, but still beat fellow losers Michael Howard in 2005 and Ed Miliband in 2015. Corbyn is the most popular loser any party has had in this century. Both his losing totals beat Blair’s winning vote in 2005.

Counter-intuitive? Perhaps, because your instinct (and mine) was right: this man was a walking electoral disaster, the death star of the political left. Yet he was also a superb harvester of support. But those two apparently contradictory statements can be reconciled by a third.