Corbyn’s rally in Manchester on Saturday was attended by 1,800 people, including actors Maxine Peake and Julie Hesmondhalgh, as the leadership favourite revealed 13,000 people have signed up to volunteer on his campaign. But does he want to be prime minister?

“Jeremy has made it quite clear he doesn’t want to be prime minister, and nor does he think he will be.” Those were the words last month of Julie Reid, a Labour councillor in Manchester, who was trying, in her own curious way, to persuade Labour members in the city’s Withington constituency to endorse Jeremy Corbyn.

Withington ended up plumping for Yvette Cooper by some margin, but the enthusiasm for Corbyn in Manchester has since grown exponentially, along with much of the rest of the country.

On Saturday night Reid, along with actors Maxine Peake and Julie Hesmondhalgh, were among around 1,800 people to attend a Corbyn rally in the Sheridan Suite in the deprived Miles Platting area of the city. Earlier in the day the unassuming MP for Islington North had addressed a thousand-strong crowd in Derby and 1,700 in Sheffield. Eight-hundred of those couldn’t fit inside the Crucible theatre, causing Corbyn to perform twice, inside and out, before legging it to the station for his next engagement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn addressing an overflow campaign rally outside the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, on Saturday. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian./Christopher Thomond

Outside the Manchester event, the Socialist Workers Party tried to sell newspapers to the substantial queue, mostly welcomed but occasionally harangued by the odd Labour member unhappy about their party being “hijacked” by the hard left. Inside, Norman Owen, former leader of the Liberal Democrats in Salford, was spotted buying a red Corbyn For Leader t-shirt.

Sitting towards the front in the same t-shirt, Reid was unrepentant about her earlier remarks. “I think that was the position then,” she said, of Corbyn’s lack of desire to be prime minister. “It was about having a debate. But I think he was so taken aback by the reception he got, the amount of people that picked up on the debate and came to the conclusion that there isn’t an alternative to Jeremy Corbyn, that the position changed.”

Looking around at the rapidly filling hall, Reid - councillor for Gorton - said: “I’ve been a councillor for five years, a Labour member for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. The only thing I can compare it to is in 1997 when Tony Blair got in after 18 years of a Tory government. But look at the amount of young people — they’re marshals here today. It’s almost like they’re disciples. It’s incredible.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maxine Peake (Shameless, Silk, The Village) was among 1,800 attending a Jeremy Corbyn rally in Manchester on Saturday Photograph: Barbara Cook/Barbara Cook/Demotix/Corbis

Under Blair — who on Sunday described Corbynmania as “Alice in Wonderland” politics — Labour party membership peaked at around 400,000 members. More than 600,000 people applied to vote in the current leadership election: many paying just £3 to be “affiliate members”. Most are expected to vote for Corbyn, who told the Manchester rally that 13,000 people had applied to volunteer in his campaign. Four hundred people turned up to man a phonebank in his constituency, he said: “There wasn’t space to put them all.”



He has so far received over £180,000 in small Paypal donations, with £23.50 the average amount pledged. To great cheers, he reeled off a list of unions who were supporting his campaign and said he had received no corporate funding: “This is a campaign about the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn, flanked by actor Julie Hesmondhalgh ( left) and Salford and Eccles Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey, reacting to the applause after addressing his campaign rally at the Sheridan Suite in Newton Heath, Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian./Christopher Thomond

Corbyn was introduced in Manchester by Rebecca Long-Bailey, who took over from Hazel Blears as MP for Salford and Eccles in May; and Cat Smith, who won Lancaster and Fleetwood from the Tories in the general election after serving as Corbyn’s parliamentary aide. Corbyn described the pair as “partners in crime” who masterminded his leadership bid so that he could get on the ballot.

Long-Bailey described Corbyn as “everything a stereotypical careerist politician isn’t.” She said she had encountered two kinds of MP in Westminster: conviction politicians and “consensus” ones. She had no time for the latter, describing them as the sort of people who think changing the world “is all a very good idea in principle but they like to put their efforts into tweaking an existing consensus and appealing to what’s popular in the media at the time.”

Hesmondhalgh, most famous for playing Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street, said she had rejoined the Labour party after its “dreadful election result” in May. She’d left the party, she said, after the party parted company with its principles. But recently she’d “started to smell something that smelled like hope, and, god help us, unity. Unity on the left!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Harris charts the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his effect on politics. He finds a political world where everything is suddenly turned upside down, and where anything is possible

Tony Blair’s final plea: Corbynmania is ‘Alice in Wonderland’ politics Read more

She described how Corbyn – “a bearded, beige-clad unassuming Labour backbencher” – was greeted like a “rock star” at an anti-austerity rally. “Maybe tried and tested socialist principles are becoming the new rock and roll,” she said, arguing: “We are not going to win the Tory vote. Nor should we try to.”

She ended by declaring, to rapturous applause: “Welcome to the vibrant, mass movement of giving a toss about stuff.”

When Corbyn eventually took to the rostrum he began with a rejection of personal insults, saying: “Whatever abuse is thrown, we ain’t replying, we ain’t giving it. We’re doing politics of our own, putting forward ideas.”

Corbyn’s vision can perhaps be summed up by a Britain which, as he put it, “cares for people who are in a bad place.” He talked of ending homelessness, supporting mental health services, regulating the private rental sector, building social housing for the most needy and showing refugees a “sense of decency and humanity”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn shaking hands with supporters after addressing his campaign rally at the Sheridan Suite in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian./Christopher Thomond

One notable absence in his speech was any talk of winning a general election or being prime minister. The other leadership candidates repeat endlessly that they want the top job and believe they can win a mandate to get it. But not Corbyn, who talks more of “we” than “I”, of “our ideas” and rarely “mine”.

“I have this desperately old fashioned point of view that policy making and decision making should not come from the top, passed down the food chain for the foot soldiers to go and knock on doors and release it on the unsuspecting public,” he said.

“I’d rather it started with the suspecting public putting their ideas forward of the kind of society, the kind of housing, the kind of health, the kind of social security systems they want so that it works through and we end up with a very broad range of support, very valuable ideas in our country that have been suppressed for so long by this ridiculous consensus in Westminster about how policy is made by party leaders.”