Often, when a new political figure enters the bigger picture, there is a period of time when they are impossible to satirise. Unless they’ve got an unusual haircut or a particularly silly voice, their personal and professional eccentricities don’t immediately come to the surface. And, in the case of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, it is because those eccentricities have been blasted away by a machine that requires them to be as slippery and faceless as possible at all times.
No so with Jeremy Corbyn. If you had to build the perfect politician for social media, it would be him. Physically, he stands apart from his rivals – he is older and shabbier, face covered with a scrub of beard and shirt pocket rammed with an entire staffroom’s worth of biros. Temperamentally, he’s different, scowling his way through all manner of tetchy interviews while the others slip untroubled from buzzword to meaningless buzzword. And he is so ideologically different that he has almost single-handedly plunged Labour into its biggest identity crisis for decades.
All this helps to make Corbyn an easily identifiable underdog. Wherever he goes, people are desperate to crush him – his rivals, the press, old prime ministers, even his own party – and, to the layperson at least, this is what makes him irresistible. A vote for Corbyn has become a boot to the mouth of The Man.
And this adds up to internet gold. All of a sudden, you can’t move for Corbyn parodies and memes. Want to see a Photoshopped picture of Corbyn as Obi-Wan Kenobi promising a new hope? Check the internet. Want to scroll through endless pictures of his face pasted on to the bodies of rippling vest models? Check the internet. Want to read a weird stream of mothers declaring their berserk lust for Corbyn, based on the fact that he reminds them of a “salty sea dog”? Check the internet, then go and scrub your face, hands and brain with Swarfega.
At the time of writing, the hashtag #JezWeCan is being used once every 25 seconds on Twitter. Over on Facebook, a tentative Jeremy Corbyn victory party is being planned for the evening of 12 September in Trafalgar Square, London, with more than 300 confirmed attendees so far. And the parody accounts. Oh, the parody accounts.
There is Stormin’ Corbyn (bio: “Soon to be the leader of the Commun … I mean Labour party”). There is my own personal favourite, @Jeremy_Orbyn, a spherical version of Corbyn who started strongly (first tweet: “its me, jeremy orbyn. im an orb”) before struggling to expand upon his premise (second tweet: “labour orb. labourb. orb”) and ultimately collapsing in on himself, exhausted (ninth tweet: “i’m old as balls i still don’t know how to stop splashback …”).
And, of course, there is the daddy of them all, @CorbynJokes. In a matter of days, @CorbynJokes has gained more than 18,000 followers, thanks to cracks such as: “I’m not saying my mother-in-law is fat, but she has to travel 80 miles to the nearest hospital that has facilities to treat thyroid problems,” and “Why did the tap dancer retire? Cuts in arts funding saw his dance troupe disband, leaving them to a reliance on food banks and benefits.”
At heart, the account is basically a refurbished version of John Thomson’s Bernard Righton character (“There’s a black fella, a Pakistani and a Jew in a nightclub. What a fine example of an integrated community”), but it caught fire thanks to Corbyn’s perceived hatred of joy in all its forms. Its creator, Jason Sinclair, has already written about his intentions in the Guardian, claiming that it shows “the left as occasionally bananas, but the right as vile”.
It is a remarkably even-handed appraisal, but would a @BurnhamJokes account be as popular? What would it even look like? Given his recent shapeshifting appearance on Newsnight – where, in a staggeringly brazen moment of Corbyn-wooing opportunism, he claimed to be disillusioned with modern politics – the punchlines would have to be tested and focus-grouped and carefully reworded until they all ended up flopping to the ground as featureless nubs. Corbyn might hate fun, but at least that counts as an identifiable trait.
But let’s not get too excited, because we’ve been here before. If this torrent of Corbyn-themed memes reminds you of anything, it’s Milifandom. You remember Milifandom. It was an outpouring of love. It was a surge of almost surreally positive tweets and images that put the swagger back into Ed Miliband’s stride and pushed him through the general election to victory.
Except it didn’t. In the harsh light of hindsight, Milifandom was just an entertaining sideshow that – along with some wildly inaccurate polling data – distracted us from the facts that public opinion was gradually drifting rightwards, the Conservatives were way out in front and Miliband was doomed to be remembered as a decent man who was hamstrung by his enduring love of stone tablets and his total inability to eat sandwiches. And the danger is that this swell of online Corbyn support – Corbyndorsement? Corbynthusiasm? Corgasms? – will prove to be just as much of a shiny death rattle as Milifandom ever was.
Abby Tomlinson, the young political activist credited with popularising Milifandom, sees the similarities between then and now, but maintains that it is no bad thing. “Like the Milifandom, Jeremy’s following is based on the politics of hope and things getting better,” she says. “The young people who are supporting Jeremy on social media are doing a great job of it, because they challenge all the claims that his politics are in some way old-fashioned, when actually he probably has the largest progressive youth following of all the candidates.”
Whether that will result in anything tangible, though, is a different matter. Politicised Twitter tends to dissolve into an obnoxious echo chamber, with followers all shouting the same basic viewpoints at each other until everyone gets worked up into such a state of hysteria that they start to believe they’re unstoppable. And, according to pollster and strategist James Morris, who led Miliband to Labour leadership victory in 2010, that is a dangerous prospect. “It’s one thing winning as an insurgent outsider, but another to successfully lead a mainstream party that wants people to trust it to govern,” he says. “The idea that there is a pent-up, ideologically leftwing vote out there, waiting to be unleashed, is a fantasy.”
Add to this the fact that Corbyn is currently trapped in what seems an impossible negative feedback loop – with the rightwing press goading its readers into supporting him in order to hobble Labour, then running outraged headlines about the dangers of Corbyn’s runaway lead – and it is impossible to know how well he is actually doing.
To have any idea at all, we’ll have to wait another five weeks and see whether the 300 people in Trafalgar Square will end up having the party of their lives, or simply dissipating, disappointed, into the night. Until then, despite all the noise and fury to the contrary, Corbyn’s future is completely up in the air.
Can Corbyn do it? Well, he is a charismatic outsider with a knack of defying all odds. And he is currently leading the polls. And, yes, he is managing to reshape the face of his own party into a weaponised version of all its best and worst traits combined, to the eternal dismay of his peers. But guess what? This all applies to Donald Trump, too. And – to paraphrase the political wisdom of election-night Paddy Ashdown – if Donald Trump ever ends up as US president, I’ll eat my hat.
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