It was with a spring in his step that Jeremy Corbyn, an unusually sprightly 70-year-old strolled down to the polling station on 7 May 2020. After all this was a day most had said would never come. The Labour leader had confounded the critics who said he’d never win the leadership, then those who said he’d be ousted after a succession of disasters.
In fact the public had rather taken to ‘Uncle Jez’ as the Daily Mail referred to him (not that Jeremy took the Mail, but his housekeeper had told him this). There had been a brief wobble when Zac Goldsmith won the London mayoralty after the Evening Standard published a dossier on Jeremy’s meetings with extremists in an attempt to taint Labour’s candidate Sadiq Khan, but that was forgotten after Jeremy delivered a rousing hour and a half speech attacking the media. Afterwards hundreds of people in Islington had patted him on the back and said they’d never buy a paper again - although he noted his newsagent still stocked the Mail and Sun.
