Jeremy Corbyn’s rise is a tale of strange accidents, unintended consequences, and long odds overcome. Corbyn was never supposed to become leader of a renewed British left wing; that role was expected to fall upon a more colorful figure, such as Tony Benn or Ken Livingstone. Corbyn was never supposed to become the leader of the Labour party; he accepted a nomination to run from a small group of left-wing colleagues only because it was his turn to represent their views. Bookies had him as a hundred-to-one long shot to win that contest. Yet he won.
After he won, Corbyn’s Labour-party colleagues expected him to go away when 80 percent of them turned against him in a vote of no confidence. But under new rules that were meant to moderate the Labour party, left-wing activists discovered they had the power to retain him as party leader over the objection of his parliamentary colleagues. Corbyn’s 2017 campaign showing was supposed to be so disastrous that the spell of Corbynmania among his fervent supporters would finally break and the party could ditch his far-left brand of politics and begin a long crawl back to the center and power.
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