It's all coming up roses for Jeremy Corbyn

With British politics in chaos, it’s hard sometimes to step back and divine the big winner. Everything seems in flux. The narrative (and the polls) could shift tomorrow. Yet another crisis could intervene and change the frame. Scandals could break. Brexit might be resolved – though it is much more likely that it will not be. But overall, it is hard to resist the temptation that the big winner in all the heat and light is… Jeremy Corbyn (above).

‘What’, you might splutter, ‘one of the most unpopular people, let alone politicians, to ever walk the planet?’ The man who’s taken Labour today into third place in one YouGov poll published today, leading a party regularly flirting with fourth place in opinion surveys and which recently suffered its worst ever national result? You might well raise an eyebrow at this particular (and counter-intuitive) Hot Take. But hear us out. It can’t hurt.

There are three main reasons why Mr Corbyn should be laughing right now. He has achieved almost complete mastery over the Labour Party machine. His main opponents, Britain’s governing Conservative Party, are in a complete mess, faced with a challenge from the Right that seems like an existential threat to their existence. And the last reason? Well, those self-same Conservatives are about to put Boris Johnson into Downing Street – a man who is more divisive, and probably has a much shorter shelf life, than a jar of marmite.

In control of the Party. Rarely can a Labour leader ever have established such complete control over the machine. It’s hard to say whether Tony Blair ever achieved such total mastery, though of course the two cases are not comparable. Mr Blair was winning elections, riding high in the polls and actually doing things at his peak between (say) 1996 and 2001. Mr Corbyn has lost pretty much every election he’s fought. But even so, it’s the latter figure who seems to rule unchallenged. It’s been an absolutely admirable, if cynical, march through the institutions, as one would expect from a cadre of Straight Left enthusiasts and trade union apparatchiks. Their talk of member-led policy was a good and effective smokescreen for a while, though now that even Corbynism’s bodged-up ‘social movement’ Momentum seems to be giving up on internal democracy, the mask has slipped.

Bit by bit, they have rightly put in their own people – Jennie Formby as General Secretary, Karie Murphy in charge of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office, Laura Murray as Head of Complaints. Not only that, but they got the ‘JC9’ elected to the Party’s National Executive Committee, ensuring that a single line or case came out of each meeting, and that their friends could do as they pleased without fear of discipline. Veteran Left-wingers such as Ann Black, as judicious as she was fair in her reporting, were replaced by advocates of The Revolution. The most critical MPs have now deselected themselves by retiring from politics, declining to run again, resigning the Whip, and joining Change UK or the Liberal Democrats. Most social democratic members have walked away. Win or lose, office or Opposition, the Left own the Labour Party for a decade or more to come. That’s a big win.

Likely to govern. Whenever the next General Election comes – and right now the assumption in Westminster and Whitehall is that it will be upon us this autumn or next spring – Labour is the most likely to be the largest Party in the House of Commons. Regular readers will know that this blog has made this argument since at least the autumn of 2017, and we see no reason at all to change our mind. Labour is indeed about as popular as rotting roadkill in your fridge. Its polling scores are mind-numbingly bad. Only Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Foot have ever been as unpopular as Mr Corbyn. But that doesn’t really matter – because the Conservatives’ support has collapsed even faster, and even further, than has Labour’s. Remember: in the event that there isn’t an electoral cataclysm that makes the Brexit Party or the Liberal Democrats the biggest Party, all that matters is the two-Party swing between Labour and the Tories. At the moment, it’s towards Labour. Ergo, they govern.

Remember also that Labour don’t have to win outright. Indeed, this seems very unlikely indeed right now. They only have to reduce the Conservative, Brexit Party and Democratic Unionist ranks in the Commons to less than around or about 322 MPs. There is no way on this planet that the Scottish National Party or the Liberal Democrats will support the Conservatives continuing in office. So as long as Labour plus SNP plus Liberal Democrat plus Plaid Cymru plus Green adds up to 322, Mr Corbyn will go and live in Downing Street. Right now, almost all the pollsters – Opinium, for instance, and Survation, the last two elections’ most accurate pollster – think that this will indeed be the case. So Labour wins. That’s not just a case we’d make from the overall numbers, by the way. Labour has the best ground game. It knows where its voters are, as the Peterborough by-election demonstrated. In a world where lots of seats are going to be won by very tight margins and in three-, four- or even five-way fights, that might matter most of all.

Faced by the worst-best opponent. The single most stupid thing the Conservatives could do would be to elect Boris Johnson as their leader. He unites all non-Conservatives in the entire country against the Tories – and back behind Labour. Imagine a General Election fought by the figurehead of the Leave campaign. All Remainers will want to get their revenge. And the only, single, or at least by far the most likely way of turfing him out of Downing Street? Voting Labour – as, indeed, voters in Mr Johnson’s own by-no-means-safe Uxbridge seat will be invited to do. The atmosphere of energy, tension – even danger – will help the Corbynites no end. Mr Johnson and Mr Corbyn are symbiotic beings. They thrive on each others’ blatant disregard for the reality-based community. What boosts ‘Boris’ causes ‘Jeremy’ to grow in the mind too.

Mr Johnson is not the man who Londoners elected as their Mayor in 2008. Then, he posed as a socially-liberal Tory that you could do business with. Now, his record of appalling racist statements, untruths, recklessness, under-prepared busking nonsense and frankly extremism has caught up with him among that half of the country that is easily labelled Remainia, but actually has far deeper roots as the outward-looking and cosmopolitan party of the country that likes to think of itself as open-minded. Reader, they absolutely loathe him, as you'll see if you click on the detailed data here. He can’t introduce himself as someone new, because to be honest he’s past his best and looking increasing shopworn – like a deflated and faded Paddington Bear. He disrupts no narrative. He finds few voters that the Conservatives haven’t discovered already. Voters might have given a Sajid Javid or a Penny Mordaunt a little bit of space and time to set out their stall. They will rightly give Mr Johnson under one tenth of one second.

Mr Corbyn often looks like a busted flush. Labour membership is falling. His own ratings are not so much in the gutter as the culvert underneath it. Labour is in rapid retreat electorally, especially in Scotland and – it seems – Wales. He is twisting and turning on the main issue of the day, to no-one’s satisfaction and everyone’s irritation. And yet he controls the Labour Party lock, stock and barrel. He is still in our view pretty likely to become Prime Minister. And his ideas have a good chance of becoming hegemonic at a time when the Conservative Party is imploding.

It’s when he gets into power that his real problems will start. Firstly: power will ebb away from him. It won’t only be the SNP and the Liberal Democrats that will have a major say over legislation. Labour MPs, powerless at the moment, will have a veto over every single law their leader wants to pass. Secondly: the leadership team’s analysis of how power works is wrong. As befits the institutional and deterministic way of seeing the world popular in the leader’s office, they think that seizing the commanding heights of the state will allow them to transform the country. Well, not for nothing have political scientists long seen capturing the core executive as wearing a ‘hollow crown’. It isn’t just that the levers aren’t connected to anything: it’s that those levers don’t even exist any more.

Three: all policies are choices, and Labour will have to start to make some. If they abolish university fees, who will get the places under any new numbers cap – the Russell Group or the others? If they want to accelerate housebuilding, where on earth will the building labour come from? Where will the houses go? If Ministers want to subsidise rail travel, do they help workers in the rush hour or relatively lower-income older travellers in the daytime?

If they bring in new types of land tenure for first time property buyers, will those owners be able to take those subsidised advantages with them? Do they allow the SNP another Scottish independence referendum? Will the Bank of England be directed to alter credit policy by region, or to accelerate ‘Green’ investment, and how? All the vague, opaque, contradictory things they have said will come home to roost. Everything in Mr Corbyn’s allotment is coming up roses – for now. But the flowers look pretty likely to be blighted things indeed.