As you may have noticed, I’ve been writing and tweeting about Jeremy Corbyn on a regular basis for quite a long time now, and today I have decided it’s time to try and stop. I’ll continue to write about Labour, and as long as Corbyn is leader, he will inevitably feature, but I am not going to write critical pieces like this or this anymore.

That’s not because I’ve changed my mind. More because I’ve grown tired of repeating the same things time and again, and also because I know constantly banging on about it annoys people I am close to, who don’t see the world in the same way as me.

So, I’m going to try and explain, as well as I can, why I am so implacably opposed to Jeremy Corbyn, why I keep talking about him, and then, I’m going to stop. I don’t expect this to change anyone’s minds, nor is that the purpose. And I’m not particularly interested in debating any of the points I’m about to discuss; because really, this story is about Jeremy Corbyn, but it is also about me.

Politically, I was a late bloomer. I didn’t grow up in a massively political household, and I only really got interested in 2002. I’d started dating a girl whose parents were socialists, and to be honest I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

At the same time, Bush and Blair were gearing up to invade Iraq, and this was my political awakening. I marched against the war in 2003, because I didn’t really understand why Iraq, and why then.

As I got into politics, I felt like I was to the left of Tony Blair on a lot of things, which in my mind at the time was the same as being to the left of the Labour Party, and I didn’t really know what to do about that. The university had some anti-war marches of its own, co-ordinated in part by the uni branch of the Socialist Party, and so it was that I wandered along to one of their meetings to find out more.

I spent probably around 18 months going to Socialist Party meetings, demonstrations, and so on, gradually realising that this whole far-left thing wasn’t for me at all. However, there were very many interesting experiences along the way. I remember asking one member what she thought a socialist society would look like; if capitalism were abolished, how would the world work? I was amazed that she clearly had no real idea of the answer.

Once, I was asked if I wanted to give a talk about Che Guevara at the next meeting. I agreed and spent some time finding out all about Che (remember, I was a political naif). The talk I gave lasted around five minutes and was what I would describe as a balanced look at Che Guevara’s life. The stony silence that followed was excruciating. A balanced look was not what the organisers had in mind; they wanted someone to get up and say how brilliant he was. I wasn’t asked to speak again.

I left the socialists behind, and joined the Labour Party in 2010.