JL

Your question makes me sound very old! In fact I’ve been incredibly rejuvenated by the last couple of years. Undoubtedly this is, in my opinion, the high point of the Left in the Labour Party in the last seventy-five years. The program that was presented in the manifesto was clearly a transformative program of the Left, with bold, imaginative policies which had a lot of popular appeal, and everybody recognizes they were discussed much more widely than is the norm than is with election manifestos.

People who were unconnected to politics knew what was in it, and liked it. That was evident on the doorstep. It was presented as a left manifesto by us, but also by our opposition. Although some people argued in advance of the publication of the manifesto that policies don’t matter, in the end I think we showed that they do.

Maybe they didn’t always but that’s because in recent decades people have been presented with a smorgasbord of small ideas designed to appeal to some segment of society, and the overall package has simply been unexciting. When you operate through a process of triangulation, when you try to beat the Tories not on the basis of a broad offer but with technocratic tweaks here and there, people don’t respond. We made sure in this election that the parties didn’t look the same. I didn’t hear anybody say “You’re all the same!” during the campaign, which is what we’ve heard for the last twenty years.

Jeremy has been uncompromising in the way he’s presented himself, he hasn’t denied anything about his past. In fact, his popular appeal is based on his past. Once we got into the campaign and broadcasters were obliged by law to be balanced in their reporting, people saw Jeremy in an unfiltered fashion. It made a huge difference.

So much of Jeremy’s coverage over the last two years has been his opposition — both inside and outside the Labour Party — rubbishing him. Once that cycle was broken, and people got to see him and his ideas in the course of a campaign, it all changed. We went from 24 percent to 41 percent in a six-week period. No party has ever achieved that.