One of the reasons why Jeremy Corbyn irritates people in Westminster is that he has risen to prominence without acquiring any of what used to be regarded as the qualities essential for success. Most leaders cultivate a solar system’s worth of orbiting journalists, who can be relied on to produce friendly columns and a supportive biography. What these writers, most of them true believers, sacrifice in insight, they gain in access: they might be regarded as slavish, but they were essential to understanding the working of the courts of David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.
For Corbyn – who, as Kitty Muggeridge once said of David Frost, “rose without trace” – the closest he had to a friendly journalist was Seumas Milne, now embedded at the heart of the Corbyn project as his director of communications, and therefore not available to write a sympathetic biography. So the studies of Corbyn thus far have been written by highly critical friends, at best.
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