In July 2015, shortly after Jeremy Corbyn became the front-runner for the Labour leadership, David Cameron bumped into him in a Westminster corridor. “You have got to be the change candidate – I was the outsider,” the Prime Minister wryly remarked, recalling his victory in the 2005 Conservative contest.
This is not the only electoral parallel between the two men. In 2015, both achieved remarkable and unanticipated victories. Cameron won a parliamentary majority, an outcome he thought so improbable that he had not prepared a speech. Corbyn became Labour leader but it was a result he originally neither wanted nor expected. “Now we need to make sure I don’t win,” he had told supporters after he made the ballot.
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