What strange times these are. Three weeks ago this election looked set to be a drab affair centred on a prime minister apparently unable to fulfil even the most basic requirements of campaigning, and the seemingly unstoppable prospect of a huge Conservative win.

Up against the Maybot, Corbyn struggles not to be a personality | John Crace Read more

“Awful and unpleasant” was the verdict of one journalist friend, and as I drove around the country trying to divine the national mood, it was hard to disagree. My personal low point was probably the council elections, in early May, when I watched a spirited and principled Labour candidate in a Lancashire village increase her party’s vote share but still lose to the Tories, thanks to hundreds of former Ukip voters turning blue. The national contest felt locked down: what it seemed to say about the future was unimaginably grim.

To characterise what has happened since is hardly easy. Contradictions abound; everything comes with caveats. A lot of people still have what Labour MPs call a Corbyn problem. Despite no end of evidence that suggests otherwise – chiefly her U-turn on social care – many voters I have met remain convinced that Theresa May is as strong and resolute as she pretends to be: “Thatcher, only a bit more gentle,” as a man in Tewkesbury said to me this week.

The details of Brexit are only just starting to intrude on the debate. And, contrary to the raptures rippling through the leftwing corners of the Twittersphere, a thoroughly undeserved Conservative victory – and the prospect of truly foolish politicians handling the most fraught set of challenges for the UK since 1945 – still seems a racing certainty.

But here is the good news. As evidenced by the prime minister’s travails, an entire way of doing politics – deadened, arrogant and often absurd – is dying in front of our eyes. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has revealed that the received wisdom of the past 15 years was wrong, and that talking in plain-spoken, moral, essentially socialist terms about the fundamental condition of the country need not entail political disaster.

Meanwhile the idea that the opinions, instincts and prejudices of the British public can be reduced to polling data looks increasingly redundant. Voters are a fascinating, unpredictable lot – something that applies all the more in an age when the idea of tribal loyalties is increasingly a relic, and the accelerated way we communicate means that things can change at speed in completely unexpected ways.

The Facebook age is egalitarian in spirit. Woe betide the politician who will not turn up to the debate

Last Saturday five wildly divergent polls put the supposed Conservative lead over Labour at between six and 14 points. Three days later, YouGov published a seat-by-seat estimate – based on “multi-level regression and post-stratification”, apparently – and claimed we were heading for a hung parliament.

When the Times put this on its front page, it felt like we were in for a week of awful political coverage led by specious survey findings. On the whole, that has not happened, which may well reflect a new set of understandings: that dealing in anything more than vague predictions is a mug’s game; and that to truly understand what’s afoot, you have to go to different places and talk to people.

My own epiphany happened this week, during two hours spent with my Guardian film-making colleague John Domokos at a shopping parade in Wolverhampton South West, said to be the Conservatives’ number 10 target seat. The first person we met was a lifelong Labour voter who clearly thought Corbyn was a walking miracle. A few Tory supporters followed, with the opposite opinion of the Labour leader.

And then we encountered two people who embodied something altogether more interesting: a woman who said she tended to back the Tories, but after long conversations with one of her daughters and a rising sense that the country was in a mess, was now a Corbyn enthusiast. Similarly, a fortysomething woman told me that after a lifetime of voting Conservative, she was so concerned about schools, hospitals and poverty that she was switching to Labour.

I then stuck my head into the local barbershop, where the two young proprietors said that they mostly followed the election on Twitter, because they liked the “jokes”. They then rattled through a few of their favourite Theresa May memes, largely centred on the idea she is the unthinking android Maybot.

This is part of the reason the Conservative campaign has unravelled. Before the advent of social media, politicians could teeter on the brink of absurdity and repeatedly fall the wrong way, safe in the knowledge that we all had to wait for the next helping of Spitting Image or edition of Private Eye for their bubble to be burst. Now it happens instantaneously. Moreover, for all its flaws, the Facebook age is egalitarian in spirit. Woe betide the politician who will not turn up to the debate, or who seems to have an aversion to meeting the public.

In the midst of all this, what can politicians do? Be yourself. Do not dissemble. Forget the old idea that if you endlessly parrot the same lines, you can be sure that most people will see the message only once or twice: the likelihood is that the parroting will be edited into a 20-second video clip, and you will be rendered absurd. Treat the orthodox media’s rituals with a gentle mockery, which chimes with how most people feel about them.

This, clearly, is a big part of the Corbyn story. But so too is something much deeper, which will have profound and enduring consequences for his party. I do not know if Labour’s manifesto is a practical programme for government. I do know that its headline proposals are perfectly suited to Corbyn’s campaigning style, and have been received by many people as a pretty vivid diagnosis of what is wrong with their country – from food banks, through crisis-plagued hospitals, to profiteering train companies.

As a worldwide crisis unfolds for social democracy, that is some achievement, and it reflects something long known on the right. As Donald Trump and Nigel Farage could tell you, straight talking is everything, and it is imperative to talk in moral terms about right and wrong. In a world that looks ever more chaotic and confounding, one that is conveyed to people via the scrolling chaos of a news feed rather than the contextualised order of a newspaper, these are basic requirements.

As strange as it may sound, who will win this compelling, almost hallucinatory contest is only half the point. Its other stories have only just started to unfold, and most of the people charged with making sense of what is going on have barely begun to understand them.