Show caption Jeremy Corbyn: ‘He has not led Labour to a catastrophic defeat but a narrow one’ Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters Opinion I was wrong about Corbyn’s chances, but I still doubt him Nick Cohen No one can deny that the Labour leader ran a fluent campaign, but can he capitalise on it? Sun 11 Jun 2017 00.07 BST Share on Facebook

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In March, the polls had Theresa May beating Jeremy Corbyn by a margin that had not been seen for decades. I said bluntly the Tories were heading for a landslide it would take the liberal-left a decade to recover from. Every Labour activist I knew agreed, including members of Corbyn’s staff.

That was the time when Theresa May compared herself to Elizabeth I. Today, she looks like Lady Jane Grey. That was the time when the Tory press compared her to Boudicca. Today, she looks like Lynda Snell. The papers are full of condemnations of her vanity and hubris. To build a personality cult when you have no personality is an act of myopia that borders on blindness. But rather than blame her, I would rather apologise to affronted Corbyn supporters instead. I was wrong. He has not led Labour to a catastrophic defeat but a narrow one.

That the paralysed Tories don’t know how to govern or what to do next is not only due to the PM’s monumental incompetence. Corbyn deserves credit. Most Labour MPs stayed in their constituencies, convinced defeat was at hand. They kept Corbyn’s name off their leaflets and told anyone who asked that Corbyn did not represent the real Labour party. His ally Diane Abbott withdrew sick and John McDonnell was kept well away from the public. The success of Labour’s national campaign was Jeremy Corbyn’s personal triumph. No one can take that from him.

While I am in the confessional, I should add that it was good to see conventional wisdom crash on Thursday night. The belief that “the young don’t vote” was also a sentence waiting to be completed with “except when they do”. The experience of the 2017 generation is of living in a society that is close to a gerontocracy. The welfare system is rigged to deliver benefits to the electorally dominant baby boomers. As Theresa May found with her dementia tax, they can destroy any attempt to make them pay more. The young must go into debt at university then and go into a country that the Resolution Foundation bleakly described as enduring its worst squeeze on earnings in 200 years.

To rub the young’s noses in it, the old voted for Brexit. It looks as if vast numbers, who did not vote last June, resolved not to make the same mistake again this summer. I enjoyed, too, watching the Tory right shudder as its confidence evaporated. It turns out that the conventional wisdom, more often found on the left, that Dacre and Murdoch can brainwash the masses was another spurious notion ready to be put out of its misery.

But there my confession must end. I don’t know about you, but my conscience doesn’t swing with the polls. I did not stop believing Donald Trump was a demagogue and a thief when he won. I wrote at length about the echoes of fascism in the alt-right. I did not stop believing that Brexit betrayed the national interest when Leave won. I wrote at length about the right’s attempts to make opposition illegitimate and turn dissenters into treasonous enemies of the people. Just because Labour lost its third election in a row by a small rather than a large margin does not mean there is no moral problem with its unprincipled version of leftwing politics.

The links between the Corbyn camp and a Putin regime that persecutes genuine radicals. Corbyn’s paid propaganda for an Iranian state that hounds gays, subjugates women and tortures prisoners. Corbyn and the wider left’s indulgence of real antisemites (not just critics of Israel). They are all on the record. That Tory newspapers used them against the Labour leadership changes nothing. As George Orwell said in another context, they still happened and “did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph suddenly found out about them”.

Beyond the moral problems lie the practical difficulties. With the British right disoriented, all Labour factions should unite against the common enemy. Of course, talented MPs should swallow their reservations and work with Corbyn. The trouble is he sems impossible to work with. In the last parliament, scrupulously loyal MPs tried to help. Lilian Greenwood described how Corbyn’s incompetence undermined months of work to publicise the cause of renationalisng the railways. Thangam Debbonaire learned that Corbyn had made her Labour’s culture spokeswoman without talking to her. Then he sacked her without telling her, when all the while she was being treated for cancer.

The doubts about principle and competence are about to assume the utmost importance. Labour fought the Brexit election on a “have your cake and eat it” ticket. It pretended Britain could continue to enjoy “the benefits of the single market and customs union” while promising freedom of movement will end. This was a lie, as it must have known, and a recipe for a hard Brexit. But the spin allowed it to collect the vote of the pro-Remain middle class and the anti-immigrant working class.

The spin can’t save Labour from tough choices. Commentators talk of the ticking “Brexit clock” when they should say the ticking Brexit time bomb. Leaving the customs union will cost £25bn a year. Leaving the single market will cost service industries £36bn. Walking away without a deal could be catastrophic: lorries backing up on the M2 waiting days for customs checks and agriculture, manufacturing, IT and financial services facing recession as open markets close. Tory ministers were planning to push nine Brexit bills through parliament. They expected to get arbitrary Henry VIII powers so they and corporate lobbyists could take apart and reassemble the economy without democratic scrutiny.

Now they do not know if they can pass a single law without Labour acquiescence. If Corbyn were to stir himself to fight, he would have to show that he had the competence to build alliances, not only with his own MPs, but with Liberals, nationalists and backbench Tories he has spent his life denouncing.