Jeremy Corbyn is on the campaign trail in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and even the stewards in the packed halls are applauding

Scotland, summer 2015, and a couple of very odd things are happening in the Labour movement. On the one hand, of course, it’s filling halls in ways undreamed of three months ago. An overspill hall was needed in Edinburgh. Friday night’s Glasgow gig for the brand new poster-boy of the left, a mere 32 years already in the ring, had to be bumped up to a whole new 950-seat venue, and already it is, as they say in these parts, hoaching, with music and warmth.

On the other hand, this is not the Labour movement, or at least not one I recognise. “It’s a shambles!” crows one of Corbyn’s organisers with something approaching glee. “It’s like something from Spinal Tap.” In what passes for the backstage green room/press room, reams of notes have been left out for all to see: the affable MSP Neil Findlay, Corbyn’s Scottish organiser and a man apparently born with every conceivable one of his shirt-tails out, has strewn random half-jotted speeches like a confetti trail.

In the early days of Blair, Mandelson, Campbell, when graded colour-charts were drawn on broadcasters’ dietary requirements and voting hues, this would have been quite inconceivable. “There’s a trick to it all, though,” confides one of the Corbyn camp. “It’s supremely clever. It’s that it’s impossible to go off-message. Because there is no ‘message’ – there’s just Jeremy!”

By the end of the night, even the dour stewards were applauding. The wheels are coming off the Corbyn bandwagon no time soon.

Stephen Leckie, a politics student and Labour member for five years, had been toying seriously with a shift to the SNP as the post-Miliband candidates began to line up. “Then I noticed this Jeremy Corbyn. I began to look at YouTube clips of speeches, read online stuff in the New Statesman. Now I’m back in the fold. Completely.”

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Earlier that day in Edinburgh I’d met Isobel Kelly, from Paisley, all the way through from the west as she couldn’t get tickets for the Glasgow event. She found him “even more vigorous, oddly charming, than I’d imagined”. Did she think if he’d been leader in May the rout in Scotland to the SNP might have been tempered? “Completely. But it’s not really that complicated. What’s happening with Jeremy is that we’re just reclaiming our own policies.”

Young April Cummings, who might just become the poster-child for resurgent Scottish Labour as did Mhairi Black for the SNP, introduced Corbyn in Edinburgh as “this wonderful man,” and a Miss Stewart – “Ms, actually” (this was Edinburgh) – who left Labour “decades ago” – had travelled to give her thoroughgoing approval to Mr Corbyn. All the evidence is that, in Scotland at least, had Corbyn been in charge at the time of the election, even the time of last year’s referendum, Labour’s meltdown may have been substantially mollified.

Oh, there are quibbles, so many quibbles, some unfortunately presentational. Shallow old me. Somehow Corbyn looks smaller and more permanently rumpled than he actually is. But Ed Miliband seemed taller and smoother than he actually was, and look where that got him. (Where is he now? Still on holiday? Does he swim with the fishes?)

And, speech-wise, Friday night’s blue riband for rhetoric was taken hands-down by a splendid Owen Jones, a Guardian columnist, who reminded a willing crowd of just how many Corbyn stances down how many decades – Mandela, when Mrs T was labelling him a terrorist; gay rights, when the Sun was in full loony-left mode; talking to Sinn Fein, years before it would bear fruit; opposing the insane arming of Saddam – seemed lost causes at the time, since proved hilariously vindicated.

But Corbyn’s past will surely be used to berate him, as it was last week by the Jewish Chronicle. It’s a fight his supporters are all apparently prepared for; time and again on Friday, it was urged on the crowd that they should be ready, if he’s elected in September, to redouble the fight, and come out battling, rather than defensive.

I asked him: did he accept – not necessarily apologise for, but accept – that his hinterland has meant unsavoury bedfellows? “There’s no denying that some people I have had to sit down with, both Israeli and Palestinian and from many other areas, have held personal views which are anathema to me, abhorrent to me. Does that mean we shouldn’t have sat down with them? It certainly doesn’t.”

Joanna Spiers, from the East End of Glasgow, who found herself sharing a train carriage with Corbyn on Friday, says: “I felt like someone was speaking to me about the Labour of my youth, my upbringing. I haven’t been able to feel trust like that since John Smith was alive. And, whisper it, but I don’t even think his ideas are that radical!”

Obviously the huge battleground, despite all these gains and every fresh poll, is middle England. Does he seriously think he could even make a chink in its carapace, given the weight of press, establishment and – worse – hostile Labour spin?

“I would hope – no, I actually believe – that there are other kinds in so-called middle England. To whom we can say: What kind of society do you want? One with an underlying, fundamental decency? One which chooses not to demonise any further the most vulnerable, swipe at the cheapest targets, the poor and the disabled?”

Did he feel a fundamental decency had been lost then in the last 20 years? “Absolutely.” Did he feel his own party was responsible for aspects of this? “Again, yes. Most certainly culpable, more than culpable. Some of the language used was dreadful.” It’s that time-honoured story, I suggest – the poor are so poor because they’re taking all our money. His smile grows almost wolfish.

“And we mobilise young people, and mobilise social media. Yes, there’s hope. Of course there’s great hope.” A genuine warm grin.

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I remembered, on the late train back from Glasgow on Friday night, having interviewed the last “hopeless’ leader”, Michael Foot, and coming across a passage by Norman Mailer, quoting Foot on the stump in 1983. “ We are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose … and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, To hell with them. The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”

I wrote back then that it was unimaginable that any Labour politician could think these thoughts, let alone utter these words, nowadays. Suddenly I’m not so sure. Fierce if not ultimately heartbreaking struggles ahead, of course. But don’t you get a frisson when tectonic plates shift even a little?