How Jeremy Corbyn Moved Past the Politics of 2016

Many people were blamed, last summer, after the citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, but the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been a squishy and tepid opponent of Brexit, was blamed more than most. “Absent from the battle,” Peter Mandelson, once a strategist for Tony Blair, complained of him. Two-thirds of Corbyn’s leadership team resigned after the Brexit vote, and of the two hundred and twelve Labour members in Parliament, a hundred and seventy-two joined a no-confidence vote against the leader. But Corbyn held on, and turned his attention to the party’s grassroots. This spring, he has so adeptly navigated an election campaign that once seemed a likely rout that he stands an outside chance of ending Thursday as the presumptive Prime Minister. On the stump, Corbyn has always been a first-rate yeller, with a nicely calibrated sense of grievance. On Tuesday, he spoke to a big crowd assembled in the Birmingham drizzle, clutching Labour’s red-bound policy manifesto in his left hand, with a late-appearing rainbow providing a background. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Corbyn yelled. “They underestimated us, didn’t they?”

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