Jeremy Corbyn, life and soul of the Labour Party

“OH, JER-E-MY COR-BYN,” sung to the opening riff of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, was the unofficial anthem of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. For the first time a politician was the star attraction of the music mudfest in Somerset. “Jezza’s” appearance in the prime Saturday slot on June 24th attracted more people, probably, than any of the acts that preceded him. And if his devotees couldn’t quite glimpse him at the back, there were Corbyn necklaces, T-shirts, posters and sand-sculptures to console them.

Ironically, it is this grizzled 68-year-old who has inspired many millennials to “stay woke”, the currently trendy term for being politically engaged. Huge numbers of them went to the polls in the election on June 8th, often for the first time, and they voted overwhelmingly for Labour. But although the personal devotion that Mr Corbyn inspires among tented grime fans has given the party a big boost, Labour remains divided on how it might capture power. As several Labour MPs were quick to point out, for all the hoopla around Mr Corbyn’s surge in the polls, he still lost.

For Corbynistas, it is a matter of “one last push” to get into Downing Street, to quote the words of Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, at a meeting of the centrist Labour Party group Progress on June 24th. With a weakened Conservative government, many expect another general election soon. The theory goes that Labour should double down on what has served it so well in the past couple of months, relying on young voters and taking aim at austerity. On June 28th Mr Corbyn tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech to lift a cap on public sector pay increases. Labour lost the vote, but panicked the government into making a chaotic double-U-turn in its own position.

Feeling vindicated by the election result, Mr Corbyn and his team remain as sectarian as before, if not more so. They have made no attempt to reach out to the Blairite centre or right of the party; the left feels that with Mr Corbyn’s new coalition of voters it can win on its own. At the Progress meeting Paul Mason, an activist and prominent Corbyn supporter, taunted those Labourites who do not share Mr Corbyn’s left-wing views to leave and “get on” with setting up their own “pro-Remain party, that is in favour of illegal war and in favour of privatisation”. Some frontbenchers, such as Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, have refused to rule out the deselection of Corbyn-sceptic MPs.

Mr Corbyn’s opponents in the party acknowledge that Labour ran a skilful election campaign. There will be no leadership challenge against him for the foreseeable future, as had been mooted before. However, many doubt the durability of Mr Corbyn’s new support. They also doubt whether it can provide enough seats to give Labour a majority. Although Labour might be able to form a government with the support of other parties if it could win just ten or so seats off the Tories, it would need to win 60 to govern alone.

For despite losing young voters, the Tories did better with the old Labour base of working-class and aspirational voters, in particular the C2s. As Marcus Roberts, a pollster at YouGov, argues, “Mr Corbyn traded an old if smaller coalition of very loyal, big turnout voters for a new coalition that is bigger but more fragile, made up of relatively low-turnout voters and decidedly low-loyalty voters.”

Labour also did well among people with higher levels of education. The problem is that most of the seats that Labour needs to win are in the north and the Midlands, with older, more working-class constituents. “What got Labour here won’t get them there,” concludes Mr Roberts. And the Tories may up their game. Theresa May’s campaign was dire; a better candidate, taking Mr Corbyn more seriously, could fare better.

Therefore, argue MPs such as Ruth Cadbury, Mr Corbyn should exploit the breadth of the party’s traditions to win more votes. “The job of leading is more than speaking to crowds of admirers, and it is vitally important that the leadership holds this government to account,” she says. Ms Cadbury increased her majority from 465 to over 12,000 in her west London seat of Brentford and Isleworth. She says some of this may have been attributable to Corbynmania, but it was also due to her stance as a fervent Remainer. Yet that will not help Labour in many of the northern, working-class seats that it still has to win.

Indeed, it is on the subject of Brexit that Mr Corbyn’s coalition may unravel. Labour MPs and activists agree that many of the young who voted for the party on June 8th were motivated by their rejection of Brexit. It is not so much Mr Corbyn that “woke” them as last year’s referendum. But Mr Corbyn is a Eurosceptic. He rails against globalisation and free trade, of which the EU’s single market is one of the world’s shining examples. EU state-aid rules could thwart his plans to nationalise or subsidise industries. He voted to leave in 1975 and last year damned the EU with the faintest of praise. Labour fudged the issue at the election, and got away with it. But appearing to be pro-European while trying to ignore Brexit, as Mr Corbyn does, is not sustainable in the longer term, warns one centrist Labour MP.

With the scrutiny of the Brexit negotiations set to dominate Parliament over the next years, at some point Mr Corbyn will have to choose. Does he accept Brexit and remain true to what appear to be his long-held beliefs, forfeiting the love of Glastonbury but maybe picking up some seats in the north? Or will he fight Brexit, as his young fans expect? Mrs May, another who voted Remain, has made her choice; the king of woke has yet to make his.