Jeremy Corbyn’s rise as Labour leader was foreseen by no one, least of all him.Illustration by Cun Shi

The astonishing political emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the British Labour Party, is the sort of thing that passes for normal in Western democracies these days. Since the economic crash in 2008, anti-establishment types have cropped up everywhere. Corbyn, a sixty-six-year-old socialist, had never held a position of authority in his party or in government before being elected last summer on a platform of benign economic populism. He is Syriza in Greece; he is Podemos in Spain; he is Sanders in America. His politics rebel against a Britain that is eager to join foreign wars and pallid in the face of social inequality. “There has to be some kind of a reckoning,” Corbyn told me recently. “You actually have to run an economy for the benefit of people, not run for the benefit of hedge-fund managers.”

Corbyn believes in grassroots policymaking, so many of his plans aren’t fully worked out yet, but they include renationalizing Britain’s railways and giving up its nuclear weapons. He wants to raise taxes on the rich, strengthen trade unions, and replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber. If Labour is reëlected in the next general election, in 2020, Corbyn envisages broad public involvement—in the form of co-operatives or government control—in the nation’s largely privatized energy and housing markets. He has mused in the past about abolishing the British Army. Universities will be free.

A big part of Corbyn’s appeal is how understated he is about all this. “I never set out in life with huge personal ambitions,” he said. Corbyn joined Labour as a teen-ager. Until last year, he was best known as a figure of perpetual protest, an old-fashioned lefty who opposed military interventions around the world and the inherent cruelty of capitalism. And yet when Corbyn speaks of himself and his political vision it is often in terms that are deliberately oblique. He likes to answer questions with questions. “Do I feel happiest with the people and their demands and their campaigns and their successes and their defeats?” Corbyn said. “Yes, I do. I can’t deny that.”

Corbyn lives in a narrow three-story house in Islington North, the inner-city London constituency that he has represented in Parliament for the past thirty-three years, and he buys his undershirts at the local street market. He is slight, with a white beard, shoulders that taper gently from left to right, and a front tooth that snags when he smiles. He travels by bicycle or train, avoiding whenever possible the official car that comes with his office.

Since becoming a major figure in British public life, Corbyn has often come across as a humble man who is being carried on a wave of feeling. Some people think he is naïve or unintelligent. Corbyn grows fruit and vegetables on a small allotment a few miles from his house, and one unkind reference that I heard in Westminster compared him to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 film “Being There.” In the film, a simpleton gardener is cast out of his dead master’s house and almost becomes President of the United States on the strength of his homespun sayings. “He is an allotment digger,” a former Labour cabinet minister told me, of Corbyn. “Plodding.” Consciously or not, Corbyn can play up to this image. For years, he was a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Cheese. When I asked him if he now has time to tend his garden, Corbyn said, “I made jam last autumn and I will make it again this year.”

In person, Corbyn is amiable in the extreme. He likes to share his sandwiches and sometimes absent-mindedly touches you on the arm. “I do have a sense of humor,” he confided. “But don’t you go telling anybody about it.” Yet Corbyn’s politics are not anodyne, and his takeover of the Labour Party has destabilized an already fractious political scene. Since 2010, the right-of-center Conservatives, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and then governing alone, have imposed unpopular spending cuts in order to close Britain’s fiscal deficit. The Scottish independence referendum, in 2014, which almost broke up the U.K., still resonates. And on June 23rd, with tension high over immigration and the economy, the country faces an even more traumatic vote, over its membership in the European Union. Polls suggest that the population is almost perfectly divided on a decision that will have profound implications for the nation’s economy, its neighbors, and its standing in the world.

In the midst of this, Labour, one of Britain’s hallowed political parties, which grew out of the workers’ movements of the industrial revolution, has become contorted under Corbyn. Although the Party is more or less united on wanting to stay in Europe (unlike the Conservatives, who are deeply split), it has spent the past eight months in a state of unhappy shock. Corbyn was elected by Labour’s membership—a collection of trade-union supporters, paid-up members, and “registered supporters,” who paid three pounds and voted online—with a larger mandate than any leader in memory. But the Party’s more moderate élites fear that Corbyn is a disaster and that his ideas will never be taken seriously by the British public.

Even Labour’s one notable victory under Corbyn—the election of Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London—has been vexed. Khan served as a transportation minister in the last Labour Government and has spent his career deep within the political mainstream. Throughout his campaign, Khan sought to distance himself from his Party leader, especially during its final days, when Labour was engulfed in an internal crisis over anti-Semitism, related in part to Corbyn’s radical past. But on the several recent occasions when I saw Corbyn, he was always the calmest person in the room. “It’s important to be relaxed about things,” he told me.

Corbyn is an outsider, but he is also the creature of a certain time and place in British history—specifically, the history of the Labour Party. That is why many of his colleagues find his rise to the leadership so difficult to accept. Within Labour, the grainy left-wing argot that Corbyn speaks—of “industrial democracy” and the “propertied classes”—recalls a set of ideas that were last abroad in the Party at the turn of the nineteen-eighties. In 1979, after Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives had thrown Labour out of office, the Party moved to the left and ran, for a time, on a quasi-socialist manifesto that later became known as “the longest suicide note in history.” On June 9, 1983, with Thatcher ascendant, Labour suffered its worst election defeat in modern times.

“I like the book club. I just think it was more fun when we were a coven.”

Corbyn was one of the new Labour M.P.s elected to the House of Commons that day. He was thirty-four. Another new member, four years younger, was Tony Blair. Through the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Blair was part of the vanguard that dismantled Labour’s left-wing platform, including its commitment to nuclear disarmament and Clause IV, which called for the public ownership of industry. Rebranded as “New Labour” after Blair became leader, in 1994, the Party became tough on crime and embraced the free market, moving to the center much as, in the United States, the Democrats did under President Bill Clinton. In 1997, Labour returned to power for the first time in eighteen years.

Corbyn and a small band of socialist M.P.s, known as the “Campaign group,” consistently opposed Labour’s evolution. During the Party’s thirteen years in power, ten of them with Blair as Prime Minister, Corbyn voted against the whip four hundred and twenty-eight times—more than any other Labour M.P. But, because Labour had large parliamentary majorities, Corbyn and his allies were largely ignored. “They were regarded as a slightly quaint irrelevance,” one of Blair’s senior advisers told me.

In May of 2010, sunk by the financial crisis, Labour lost power. Last year, after five years in opposition under Ed Miliband, a former environment minister, Labour lost again. Miliband failed to shed the idea that the Party had spent irresponsibly while in office, and to articulate a clear response to the austerity regime of the new Conservative-led coalition. In 2015, David Cameron and the Tories won an outright majority in the House of Commons. Miliband resigned within hours. A few weeks later, Corbyn resolved to stand for leader. “I thought there was an opportunity for the left to try and understand that, by a timid acceptance of the politics of austerity, we had lost ourselves the election,” he told me.

Corbyn entered the race as the token socialist. Bookmakers gave him odds of a hundred to one. But Labour’s leadership contest last summer took place under rules that had not been tried before. Previously, trade unions and the Party’s M.P.s had been able to control the process. Now candidates needed the support of only thirty-five M.P.s—fifteen per cent of the total—for their names to go forward to a straight vote by Labour’s individual members.

Thirty-six M.P.s (just enough) backed Corbyn, but after speaking at ninety-nine rallies across the country and drawing bigger crowds than his three rivals—all former members of Miliband’s team—his election began to appear inevitable. Hundreds of thousands of Labour supporters were inspired by Corbyn’s plainspoken populism, from former members driven away by Blair’s hawkish foreign policy to young people taking part in politics for the first time. Between May and September, Labour’s voting membership surged from two hundred thousand to five hundred and fifty thousand.

Corbyn learned of his victory just before noon on Saturday, September 12, 2015, in a small conference room overlooking Parliament Square*. Among Labour members around the country, he won 59.5 per cent of the vote, a larger mandate than any recent leader, including Blair. But of two hundred and thirty Labour M.P.s who sit in the House of Commons, only twenty had voted for the new leader.

Now that he is in charge, many of Corbyn’s more centrist colleagues fear that his greatest priority—more important than winning the general election in 2020—is to restore Labour’s lost purity. “I don’t think he envisages himself walking through the door of No. 10,” a former adviser to Miliband told me. “I think he regards himself as a soldier in a longer fight. The Bolsheviks were this. It was about being there when the end comes, capitalism unravels, and the envelope opens.”

This anxiety has led to constant rumors in the British press of coups to topple Corbyn. Early predictions were that he wouldn’t last a month. But if such plots existed they have all been stymied by the support that Corbyn retains among the Labour membership, where he enjoys an approval rating of more than fifty per cent. “We are in a situation now where he is unelectable in the country but unassailable in the Party,” Lord Mandelson, one of Blair’s closest advisers and an architect of New Labour, told me.

Corbyn himself avoids confrontation and says little to either reassure or frighten his fellow M.P.s. “Can we take people with us?” he said. “To some extent.” But many of his old allies, whom he has promoted to help run the Party after years in the wilderness, are not so peaceable. “His strength—and weakness—is that he always sees the good in other people,” John McDonnell, another veteran socialist M.P., said, when we met in the Palace of Westminster.

McDonnell was Corbyn’s campaign manager last summer and is now the shadow Chancellor. (In British politics, the opposition creates a “shadow” cabinet to respond to the Government.) When I asked him if he could convey just how improbable it was that he and Corbyn were now in charge of Labour, McDonnell quoted Fredric Jameson, an American literary theorist and Marxist scholar. “It is easier for people to imagine the end of the earth than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” he said. “And that is what we are about, aren’t we?”

Once a week, on Wednesdays at noon, the Prime Minister faces half an hour of interrogation at the hands of M.P.s from the House of Commons. If you happen to have an image of the British Parliament as a place of impenetrable ritual, where men with sharp accents jump up and down, shout, guffaw, and wave around pieces of paper, Prime Minister’s Questions, or P.M.Q.s, as it is known, is just like that. It is politics as pugilism, joined by class and custom to the playing fields of Eton and the debating halls of Oxford, in which the main event is the showdown between the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister. Each week, the former is allowed six questions to trip up, shame, and admonish the latter. The Prime Minister, aided by softball questions from his own side, seeks to demonstrate that his opponent is ridiculous, feeble, and unpatriotic for doing so.

Since becoming the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, Corbyn has sought to change the tone of P.M.Q.s. “I am not particularly good at or interested in this theatrical-riposte stuff,” he told me. He likes to crowdsource his material. Every Sunday night, his office sends out an e-mail to Labour supporters, and on Wednesday Corbyn presents Cameron with a question from “a woman called Marie” or “Vicky from York.” Many M.P.s whom I spoke to sympathized with Corbyn’s instincts, but said he was missing the point. P.M.Q.s may look silly, but most party leaders take it extremely seriously, to show that they are on top of their brief and to rally their M.P.s behind them. Blair wore the same lucky shoes to P.M.Q.s for ten years. His successor, Gordon Brown, would spend a day and a half each week preparing. When I asked Corbyn how long he takes, he replied, “Everybody in the office says not enough. Everybody.”

“Take this toaster—it’ll really freak out whoever finds you in sixty-five million years.”

I reached the chamber shortly before noon. From the press gallery, the House of Commons—with its cramped benches, green carpet, and the thin descending wires of dozens of small microphones—suggested the bottom of a well. In the minutes before P.M.Q.s, the benches filled with M.P.s, and from the burr of conversation a live mike picked up the voice of a junior minister talking about whiskey duty in Scotland. With about a minute to spare, Cameron and Corbyn materialized on their opposing benches. The Prime Minister is a beefy, confident man, educated at Eton and Oxford, and rarely troubled in the Commons. Corbyn, who took a few classes on trade-union politics in the early nineteen-seventies, wore a dark-blue suit jacket that he has acquired since becoming Labour leader.

The chamber was more full, and more tense, than usual. The previous day, March 22nd, terrorists had bombed the Brussels airport and subway system, killing thirty-two people and injuring three hundred more. The Conservatives were also enduring one of their most difficult weeks since coming to power in 2010. A few days earlier, as part of the Budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, had announced a £4.4-billion reduction in benefits for people with disabilities. The measure contrasted sharply with its tax cuts for businesses and higher earners, and led to an outcry from charities and the press. Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader and welfare minister, resigned in protest, and the Government abandoned the idea.

The discord presented Corbyn with an obvious opportunity at P.M.Q.s, but he had his own problems. That morning, the Times of London had published a leaked document, apparently prepared by allies of Corbyn, ranking M.P.s in the Party according to their loyalty to him. On the list, members were assigned to one of five categories, from a “core group” and a “core group negative” to a “hostile” cadre of thirty-six M.P.s which included Khan, the Party’s candidate for mayor of London, and Rosie Winterton, its chief whip.

Corbyn rose to his feet. A silver gilt mace sat between him and the Government benches. Unlike Cameron, who often turns sideways during P.M.Q.s to seek the support of the M.P.s behind him, Corbyn looks straight ahead and grips the wooden despatch box in front of him with both hands. After decades spent addressing rallies and Parliament, he is a durable, rather than a gifted, speaker, and he rarely lands the joke or telling phrase that makes the Commons roar or stamp its feet.

In his first question, based on a letter from a man named Adrian, Corbyn asked the Prime Minister to apologize for the planned cuts to disability payments. Cameron demurred. For his second, Corbyn asked Cameron to rule out any further welfare cuts: “Yes or no?” The Prime Minister talked instead about getting disabled people into the workforce. Cameron let Corbyn ask his third and fourth questions before he brought up the leaked list. “We have a very interesting document today,” he said, taking out a piece of paper. “The spreadsheet of which Labour M.P. is on which side.”

Members on both sides started to shout as Cameron proceeded to call out the relative loyalties of Corbyn’s front-bench team. Angela Eagle, the shadow Business Secretary, sitting next to Corbyn, was “neutral but not hostile,” Cameron noted. The jeering became louder. “I’ve got all day,” Cameron said, adding that he would consider himself “core” support. The irony was that the Tory Party itself is deeply divided over the forthcoming E.U. referendum, and for a few seconds it seemed as though every M.P. in the chamber was hollering and waving his or her hands, as if hailing the disintegration of the world. “I thought I had problems,” Cameron said.

Corbyn got through two more questions and sat down. In the press gallery, a journalist’s iPad showed a tweet by John Woodcock, a Labour M.P. (hostile), saying the session had been a “fucking disaster.”

It wasn’t over. A Conservative backbencher asked the Prime Minister to condemn anti-Semitism in the U.K. It was a setup to attack Corbyn. One allegation against the hard left in Britain is that its aggressive criticism of American foreign policy, Israel, the mainstream media, and global finance can amount, on occasion, to prejudice against Jews. In 2009, Corbyn hosted a delegation from Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group, in London, referring to them and Hamas, which is committed to the destruction of Israel, as friends. This has led to questions about Corbyn’s own stance toward Israel and his ability to keep the views of his supporters in check. Cameron went after Corbyn again. “We do see a growth in support for . . . anti-Semitism in part of the Labour Party, and I say to the leader opposite it’s his party and he should sort it out,” he said. Corbyn had used all six of his questions and was not able to reply. It was the only time in two months of following Corbyn that I saw him lose his temper. “Disgraceful!” he shouted. “Disgraceful!” But his microphone was off, and his voice was lost in the din.

From the moment Corbyn arrived in the Commons, three decades ago, he felt that things weren’t right. Labour was in retreat, Thatcherism was at its height. Britain’s state-run telecommunications, gas, and energy sectors were being privatized, and the nation was dizzy with victory in the Falklands War, a conflict that Corbyn had opposed. “It was like standing at the target on a golf range where they are just firing balls at you,” he said. And yet he sensed little life in Westminster, with its deferential committees and its warren of smoke-filled bars.

In the spring of 1984, a nationwide miners’ strike began. Corbyn left his home in North London each morning at dawn and spent the day on the picket lines outside coal mines that were patrolled by police and arrived every evening to find fellow M.P.s talking tactics in the tea room. “It was kind of weird days,” Corbyn told me. “They weren’t serious about winning. We were.”

He was raised in a different tradition. Jeremy Bernard Corbyn was born in Wiltshire, in 1949, the youngest of four sons. His parents, David and Naomi, trained as scientists; they’d met in 1936, in London, at a gathering to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. “They were thrifty, handy, practical, and left wing,” Corbyn’s brother Piers told me. They believed in the rational progress of socialism. Corbyn grew up in large, drafty houses, first in Chippenham and then Pave Lane, in Shropshire. The yard was always full of half-built boats, sundials, and meteorological equipment.

Corbyn’s three brothers became scientists, but he had a head full of causes. He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at fifteen and Labour the following year. Corbyn failed his A levels and went to Jamaica with the Voluntary Service Overseas—the British equivalent of the Peace Corps—where he taught geography to classes of seventy boys at a time. While the boys made maps, Corbyn’s eyes opened to the injustice of the world. He travelled in Latin America, arriving in Chile for the election of Salvador Allende, in 1970. He fell in love with the continent and its struggles. (He has been married three times; his second wife, with whom he has three grown sons, was Chilean, and his third is Mexican.) He tried to call home once in two years, but his parents were out.

“Is there anything sadder than an underfunded wax museum?”

He returned to England and became active in Labour, working for trade unions. Corbyn met his first wife, Jane Chapman, in 1973. The following spring they campaigned together to become councillors in Haringey. They were elected on a Thursday, married on the Saturday, and named their cat after the incoming Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

Corbyn spent all his time at meetings. “He never read anything,” Chapman told me. “All the books were mine.” (They divorced in 1979.) Corbyn’s talents were practical: knocking on doors, targeting the next ward. “Jeremy definitely saw himself not as a potential leader but as an organizing rebel,” Chapman said. “That’s what keeps him going. It is the endorphins of springing into action for another election, another meeting, another protest.”

It became the rhythm of his life. In Parliament, Corbyn has divided his time between the daily concerns of his constituents in Islington (he was reëlected in 2015 with sixty per cent of the vote) and the giant causes of the left. “If you want him to go and meet someone in Upper Volta, or whatever it is, because there is a battle going on, he will go,” John Lansman, a longtime activist who helped run Corbyn’s campaign, told me.

Like other socialist M.P.s of his generation, Corbyn modelled his politics on those of Tony Benn, a former industry minister who, in 1981, narrowly failed to become Labour’s deputy leader. “Tony was always challenging,” Corbyn told me. “I admired that.” Benn, a former aristocrat who gave up his title to sit in the Commons, became an increasingly radical figure, speaking out against the financial and military power of the United States and of organizations such as NATO and the International Monetary Fund.

Corbyn’s causes eventually outnumbered his mentor’s: Sinn Fein, in Ireland; the A.N.C., in South Africa; the Kurds, in Iraq; as well as Palestine, Namibia, Congo, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela’s Chávez. From 2011 until his election last year, Corbyn was the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, Britain’s leading left-wing movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spoke at the group’s first meeting, which was held two weeks after 9/11. “No to bombing, no to revenge,” Corbyn said that day. “We have to look to the causes of this act. A quarter of the world’s population is in poverty. Global corporations dominating the world is not the solution.”

Critics say that Corbyn’s life as a protester means that he has never matured into a grownup politician. Even his allies admit that he is not well suited to the necessary compromise required to run the Labour Party, let alone the fifth-biggest economy in the world. Colleagues at Stop the War and in Corbyn’s campaigns over the years described him as a constant volunteer, happy to make suggestions before getting on his bike to go to the next event.

“He is not a strategy person,” Lansman said. “He is a doer, really.” Bob Clay, a former Labour M.P. who shared an office with Corbyn in the nineteen-eighties, has sat through hundreds of meetings with his old friend. “I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but it is maybe a bit of a fault—he is something of a gadfly,” Clay told me. “He is just more an originator of good ideas rather than someone who sees them through.”

To those who oppose him, Corbyn’s activism amounts to such a damning critique of the West—specifically of the U.S., global capitalism, and multinational organizations—that his policies cannot be applied to the world as it is. “He is essentially anti-Western—I mean in political terms, in institutional terms,” one former minister told me.

During Corbyn’s leadership, his analysis of the root causes of Islamist terrorism has come under particular scrutiny. “The Taliban were formed with U.S. weapons; Al Qaeda was founded by U.S. trainers,” Corbyn said in 2013. “What goes around comes around.” Last November, after the Paris attacks, one of Corbyn’s shadow ministers, Pat McFadden, stood up in the House of Commons and asked Cameron to “reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the West do.” Corbyn fired him for disloyalty. “The protest mind-set finds it very difficult to say, ‘This reality is not perfect but it is worth defending,’ ” McFadden told me, when I stopped by his office recently. “Underneath the relaxed geography-teacher demeanor, there is a line: you don’t disagree with the world view.”

Corbyn’s first meaningful act of compromise as Labour Party leader was to speak out last month in favor of Britain’s membership in the E.U. It was not a controversial step: the rest of the Labour Party overwhelmingly supports membership, and the last time politicians were asked to decide between staying or leaving was in a referendum in 1975.

Still, until he became Labour’s leader, Corbyn was an implacable critic of the E.U. Although withdrawal has long been an obsession of the Conservative Party’s right wing, there has always been a minority on the Labour left that sees the bloc as a free-market, vaguely militaristic project designed to serve the interests of large corporations ahead of citizens. Forty years ago, as a Labour councillor, Corbyn voted against Britain’s membership in the European Economic Community, and as an M.P. he has opposed two further E.U. treaties, lamenting the bloc’s lack of democratic accountability. In 1993, Corbyn described the E.U. as part of “what I believe is an extremely unjust world economic order.”

One evening in March, I attended a small left-wing, anti-E.U. event in the basement of a Y.M.C.A. in Bloomsbury. Among those onstage were Lindsey German, one of the founders of Stop the War; Liz Payne, the leader of the Communist Party of Britain; and Tariq Ali, a left-wing writer who has been friends with Corbyn since the early nineteen-seventies. About a hundred people listened to speeches describing the “military interests of the profit seekers.” Afterward, I went for a drink with Ali. I asked him if Corbyn would have been at the meeting if he was not the Labour leader. “Without any doubt,” Ali said. “Jeremy is completely opposed to the E.U.”

A few weeks later, on April 14th, I went to see Corbyn give his first speech for Labour’s pro-E.U. campaign. It was held in a monumental tower at the University of London. Corbyn wore a blue shirt, open at the neck, a linen jacket, and striped socks. When he can, he likes to mention left-wing thinkers, and he noted that the building was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.” The man next to me, a Labour councillor from Kent, whispered, “Why the bloody hell doesn’t he have a bloody tie on?”

“That’s just the booze listening.”

Corbyn’s speech was no great celebration of the European Union, but he concluded that Britain was better off staying in, “warts and all.” The whole tenor of the “In” campaign has been muted, raising fears that more motivated “Out” voters will carry next month’s referendum. When I asked Corbyn later about his view of the E.U., he said, “Do I like the way it is run? No. Do I think there has to be a coming together of progressive movements across Europe to challenge global capitalism? Yeah.”

Once the live broadcast of his speech was over, though, Corbyn showed why he is an alluring figure. A student asked about the refugee crisis in Europe, which has revealed the fragility of a myth that the Continent likes to tell about itself: that it is liberal, civilized, and not as scared as everyone else. The crisis has flummoxed leaders on the left and the right, from Berlin to Athens, but Corbyn didn’t need to think. “They are all human beings, just like you and me,” he said. “In a different set of circumstances, we could all be in those refugee camps.” When he speaks simply and off the cuff, Corbyn can have the moral clarity of a priest. The room broke into loud applause.

In April, Labour moved ahead of the Tories in the polls. But a few days before May 5th, when a set of local and mayoral contests across the country would present Corbyn with his first electoral test as leader, questions about rising anti-Semitism within the Party broke into the open. On April 26th, Naz Shah, a Muslim M.P. from Bradford, who was elected in 2015, admitted sharing Facebook posts the previous year that suggested that Israelis should be “relocated” to the U.S. “Problem solved,” she wrote. Another post showed Martin Luther King, Jr., with the quote “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal,” under the hashtag #ApartheidIsrael.

Shah was suspended from Labour, but the next morning Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London and a Corbyn ally, gave a bizarre radio interview defending her. “It’s completely over the top, but it’s not anti-Semitic,” Livingstone said. “Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932—his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism.” The chaos was complete when Livingstone, a renegade figure of the old left, who has made anti-Semitic remarks before, was confronted on the stairs of the BBC’s Westminster studio by another Labour M.P., John Mann, who accused him of being a “Nazi apologist.” The exchange was captured on video and within minutes was the lead item on British news.

At the time, Corbyn was in the northern town of Grimsby. At least once a week, he likes to campaign outside London, often stopping on the street for long conversations with the public. When the news came through, Livingstone was suspended from Labour, too. In the days afterward, Corbyn’s office scrambled to show that he was in control. The Party appointed Shami Chakrabarti, a respected lawyer and human-rights activist, to investigate anti-Semitism within Labour, and twenty more members were suspended, mostly for posting offensive material on social media.

Many on the left of the Party noted the opportune timing of the furor and sensed another plot against Corbyn. But it was impossible to shake the idea that although Corbyn is not anti-Semitic, he has stood in solidarity with people and groups that are. “Leaders are role models,” Jeremy Newmark, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, a formal affiliate of the Party, told me. “Jeremy’s remarks describing Hamas as friends, and at the same time Hamas is an organization whose charter contains incitement to genocidal anti-Semitism—that sends out a message.”

A former Labour minister was in despair. “What has given rise to this?” he said. “This is a great political party.” He listed Labour’s Prime Ministers since the war. “This is the party of Attlee, of Wilson, Callaghan, Blair, and Brown. Look at what it is concerned with now. Look at what it is grappling with.”

Polling Day, May 5th, was the first summery day of the year. Corbyn spent the morning cycling around Islington North, talking to voters. He went to the market and bought some undershirts. Constituents stopped him with problems as he went, and Corbyn wrote down their names and concerns in a black notebook that he carries for the purpose.

We met in a café on the Holloway Road, one of the main streets that runs through his constituency. “It feels like I’m at home,” he said. “It’s like family. Today has been lovely.” He had just been stopped by an older Jewish woman, a Labour voter who said she was unable to vote for the Party. They spoke for a few minutes. “She said, ‘Thank you very much. It’s good to talk to you, to hear from you what you actually believe as opposed to what the media say you believe,’ ” Corbyn said. “I don’t know how she’s going to vote.” He ordered an omelette and fries.

Over the next twenty-four hours, Labour did better than predicted, which was not very well. The Party lost only a small number of council seats in England, but ceded control of the Welsh Assembly and was pushed into third place in the Scottish Parliament. Labour’s big winner, meanwhile, the new Mayor of London, used his first weekend in office to criticize Corbyn’s handling of the anti-Semitism scandal and exhorted Labour to reach out again to the political middle ground. After his swearing in, Khan attended a Holocaust memorial ceremony. “There’s no point in us just speaking to Labour voters,” he told the BBC. “What we need to do is speak to everyone.” In the end, the election results were a stalemate—and thus a victory for the Conservatives, suggesting that Corbyn’s Labour Party has yet to start on the road back to power.

During our lunch, I asked what Britain might look like under a Corbyn premiership. He challenged the premise of the question. “Well, it is not going to be under Jeremy Corbyn,” he said. “I am hoping there will be a Labour Government, of which I will be obviously a big part. But it’s about empowering people. That is what democracy is about. Is it going to be complicated? Sure. Is it going to be difficult? Absolutely. Are we going to achieve things? Oh, yes.” He smiled and took a bite of his omelette. Corbyn’s sons stopped by to say hello. He signed some T-shirts for Bolivian orphans. And then he started talking about an olive tree that grows in his garden. ♦

*An earlier version misstated the name of Parliament Square.