Jeremy Corbin’s unexpected rise to lead the Labour party in 2015 has been the subject of many rushed books. While Rosa Prince’s Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup was an account of “ex-girlfriends, [and] the state of his flat” Richard Seymour’s Corbyn: The Strange Birth of Radical Politics is a more serious account of the Corbyn phenomenon. Alex Nunns’ book The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power is a much more detailed study of the Corbyn-mania and the forces that propelled it into being.
The book maps, in great detail, how Corbyn became the unlikely candidate and how his equally improbable rise was organised and managed against the powerful trio of the hostile media, the parliamentary labour party and the Labour party machine. The Candidate locates the rise of Corbyn in a number of related developments — the election of Ed Miliband as the leader of the Labour party was the first sign of a coming rupture with the new Labour. And it was this that paved the way for Corbyn’s rise.

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