Explaining the Corbyn surge isn't rocket science

Jeremy Corbyn is being mobbed. As he emerges from a speech at London's Bloomsbury Baptist Church he's rushed by a crowd of supporters, contorting themselves into improbable positions to get a clear shot for their selfies. Grinning young women in headscarves collide with grizzled older men in pastel tones. “Get that copy of the Socialist [Worker] out!” yells a concerned supporter, with one eye on the publication held aloft near Corbyn's head, and another on the TV camera dancing from side to side in search of a sight line on Labour's leadership frontrunner.

It's tangible, if anecdotal, evidence of what the papers and the airwaves are telling us: the Corbyn surge is real. Yesterday afternoon, shortly before Corbyn spoke in Bloomsbury, a leaked poll put him 19 points ahead of Yvette Cooper, the potential runner-up, in Labour's leadership contest. It followed a public YouGov poll which had him just in front of Andy Burnham. The New Statesman's Stephen Bush hit the phones over the weekend and found that the conversations he had backed up the data. There's plenty still to play for until September but, at the moment, and to the befuddlement of the political mainstream, Labour really could be on course to elect a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to 70s sitcom character Citizen Smith.

But why? If the event last night—organised by fellow left-winger Diane Abbott's mayoral campaign—is any guide, it really isn't rocket science. He’s just following his election ABCs far better than the supposed all-conquering vote winners of the centre.

First, far more than any other leadership contender, if you put a cross next to Corbyn you know what you're getting. His speech last night was clear, strident, and delivered with a mix of emotion and humility beneath the church's imposing crucifix. The NHS? Check. Don't privatise it, we're all dependent on it. The welfare state? Check. By and large, keep it intact, despite the “daily diet in some of our media” that “the whole problem is caused by some people wrongly claiming their benefits.” Iraq? A “disaster.” Trident? Scrap it and get our engineers working on green energy. Britain's future? “A force for promotion of peace and good in the world, not the promotion of greed and war.” Cue standing ovation.

It's tempting to dismiss this as easy; centre-left Labourites might say that simple worldviews make for simple speechwriting. But that's not the case. Contrast Corbyn, for example, with Abbott, whose rambling effort lost its more strident points among tired metaphors (to "those who live in the Westminster bubble" she was keen to say that "the rules of the game have changed.") and an attack on rival Tessa Jowell for her association with the Blairite think tank Progress.

Corbyn instead wasted next to no time on his opponents, focusing instead on simple language and infectious ideas infused with positivity and hope. And don't tell me it's not possible for a centrist candidate to do the same. Anyone who doubts it should tune in to the characteristically arresting speech Tony Blair gave last week. The other leadership candidates are not “Tory-lite,” just as Ed Miliband was not “Red Ed.” But as with the hapless former leader, the onus is on them to explain that, not on the voters to somehow grasp it by themselves.

Second, of course, Corbyn's offering, however clear, would be useless without a receptive audience. And he's certainly found that. It's now de rigeur to note his remarkable popularity among new, young members and registered supporters. Plenty were there last night; one backwards-cap toting audience member rose to proclaim: “keep speaking for the young people in this country, because it's going to work.” But last night was a reminder, too, that unlike Labour's right, the left has plenty of solid (if battle-scarred) institutions to welcome new comrades into the fold, and they're closer to getting what they want than they have been in years. Andrew Berry from Unison—which today decided to back Corbyn—suggested that his union's members had been largely calling for the left-winger. He joined the party in the 1980s, he said, "and I don't think I can remember being so excited.”

Ed Miliband was forever trapped in a game of political twister, scrambling to cover as many bases on the left and in the centre as he could sustain at the same time. In the absence of a compelling centrist argument that he should have focused on the latter, last night showed how free the left is to make the argument that Miliband simply wasn't radical enough. There were boos and hisses for Tony Blair and smattered laughter at Ed Balls losing his seat during NEC member Christine Shawcroft's speech, which railed against previous administrations for stripping the party of a distinctive offer. Her speech, too, alighted on a core Corbynite desire: for Labour to be a bolder party of opposition. “When I go out canvassing people don't say you're too left wing in the Labour party,” she said, “they say 'you're all the same as each other.'”

Whatever you might think of Corbyn, he would certainly silence those claims. And in the absence of a compelling defender of the mainstream, he might get the chance to.