LONDON — Jeremy Corbyn has done it again — he’s confounded everyone’s expectations. This time, he’s done it not by winning the Labour leadership but in his latest bid to win the general election itself. He has hired the Guardian columnist Seumas Milne to be his director of communications.

This is a man who many in the British media — the very people Corbyn’s team will need to reach out to, after all — regard as being as close to an unreconstructed Stalinist as you can get in 21st century Britain. Holding the sorts of positions Milne does takes serious commitment these days, considering the Soviet archives have long been opened and Communism has gone the way of feudalism as a viable, or indeed ethical, political system.

Milne has made a point of arguing that the number of Stalin’s victims has been greatly exaggerated. His views on global geopolitics represent the worst of unthinking, historically illiterate, and reactionary leftism. The South Ossetia conflict? Not the result of Russian aggression but U.S. interference. Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea? Not Moscow’s fault — it’s all down to Western expansionism. The Islamist extremists who killed British soldier Lee Rigby on the streets of London? Merely the “predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the U.S., Britain and others in eight direct military intervention in Arab and Muslim countries.” From Hugo Chavez to Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, every dictator and demagogue standing up to so-called U.S. imperialism is a de facto good guy.

Even by the standards of the hard left, Milne is almost pathologically unwilling to let the tiresome facts of reality intrude upon the certainty of ideology.

Milne’s appointment has caused predictable outrage online and in print. But his political beliefs are not the point here; they are, after all, in line with Corbyn’s. The @JeremyCorbyn4PM account — which is not Corbyn’s official spokesperson account but was responsible for the #JezWeCan social media campaign — recently tweeted “Seumas shares Jeremy’s world view almost to the letter.”

The real issue is not that Jeremy Corbyn has appointed Milne as his director of communications, it’s that he’s done it knowing full well the furore it would cause. As far as the Tories are concerned a crank has now employed an even bigger crank to be his public mouthpiece. It’s Christmas come early. Again.

So why did he do it? There are two conceivable possibilities. The first: Corbyn is so far removed from reality that he genuinely believes Milne will help his cause, and finally awaken the public from its supposed“false consciousness.”

The second: Corbyn and his team are not totally in the grips of solipsism and do understand the potential damage Milne’s appointment will cause. They just don’t care. Jeremy Corbyn has built a career on being contrarian, and in that sense, hiring Milne makes perfect sense. He is after all, ideologically “pure,” and this is perhaps more important to the ideologues who now form Labour’s core leadership than beating the Tories.

So we return to the questions that have repeatedly been asked of the Labour party since it elected Corbyn back in September: Does the party genuinely want to take power and bring about the improvement it so adamantly claims it wants to see? Or has it reduced itself to a “party of protest,” its leadership and supporters more concerned with parading their supposedly progressive — though in fact deeply reactionary — positions? Is Labour still a political movement for change or has it become a nursery designed to make its supporters feel good about themselves?

These are valid questions. Milne’s appointment is a politically cretinous one. It’s not only the Tories who regard him as a crank. Like Corbyn himself, his views don’t keep with those of the wider electorate, who may not shout the loudest but voted the Tories in just over four months ago. Corbyn has doubled down on his own biggest weakness. He has reinforced people’s worst fears about him rather than allay them.

The one man who seemed absolutely delighted with these recent events is the former MP and current London mayoral Candidate George Galloway, who was, it should be remembered, expelled from the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute. Galloway defers to no one, not even Corbyn, in his support of anti-U.S. dictators and is Milne’s unashamed ideological bedfellow. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he tweeted in response to Milne’s appointment. The tweet’s geolocation? Moscow.

David Patrikarakos is a frequent contributor to POLITICO. You can follow him on Twitter at @dpatrikarakos.