Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has been the MP for Islington North since 1983. For most of that time he was a backbencher in the small print of Labour's history, voting against his own leadership on Iraq, on welfare reform, on Trident, on more or less anything Tony Blair or Gordon Brown asked him to support. His career was a long argument with the parliamentary party that occasionally employed him.

The 2015 leadership contest was the political accident that reset everything. Labour was reeling from defeat. The new leadership rules let registered supporters vote for £3. Corbyn got on the ballot through nominations from MPs who did not intend to vote for him. He won decisively. The party establishment never recovered from the shock and spent the next four years trying to undo it.

Corbyn's appeal was unusual in modern politics. Supporters responded to him because he sounded like a person with fixed beliefs, in an era when most senior politicians sound like the outputs of a focus group. He shifted Labour's policy ground sharply to the left on public ownership, taxation and welfare. Even opponents tend to admit that several positions once dismissed as unworkable have since drifted into mainstream debate.

The 2017 general election was the high point. Labour exceeded almost everyone's expectations and denied Theresa May her majority. For a few weeks Corbyn looked like a serious challenger. The 2019 election was the collapse. Labour lost seats it had held for generations across the North and Midlands, and the Brexit position the leadership had tried to triangulate satisfied no-one.

The antisemitism crisis defined the later years of his leadership. Whether you take the view that it was a real institutional failure or a politically motivated campaign or a mixture of both, it left lasting damage to his reputation and to Labour's. The official inquiries that followed produced findings he and his allies still dispute. The dispute is unlikely to be resolved by either side.

After losing the leadership and then the Labour whip, Corbyn ran as an independent in Islington North in 2024 and won. That result said something about the durability of personal loyalty in a long-served seat, and something about how disconnected Labour's national position is from parts of its traditional base. He has since been associated with a new political vehicle on the left, the practical reach of which is not yet clear.

Corbyn's legacy is genuinely contested. He moved the Overton window in some places, lost arguments he should have won in others, and treated public life as a continuation of activism rather than a different discipline. Whether that makes him a wasted opportunity, a useful disrupter or both will probably be argued for decades. The disagreement is itself part of the result.