Want the top news headlines sent to your inbox daily? Sign up to our FREE newsletter below Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Something remarkable has happened to Jeremy Corbyn.

He’s become much better at his job, but it took the threat of being sacked to make it happen.

Mr Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party and its fair to say his record has been mixed so far.

He’s certainly done a poor job of explaining what he actually wants to do if he becomes Prime Minister.

When it comes to generalities, Mr Corbyn is great. Peace, justice, kindness, an end to war, poverty and injustice - there’s no doubting where he stands on this issues.

But how will he achieve any of his aims? It’s been a mystery - until now.

Some of Mr Corbyn’s supporters appear convinced that he’s been busy setting out policies and making announcements but the media have simply refused to report anything he says (unless they can twist his words to make him look bad).

Not so. The news media, whether online, on the telly or good old-fashioned newspapers, love an announcement. They’ll seize on any hint that a politician actually has something interesting to say about schools, hospitals or railways - issues that their readers and viewers care deeply about.

But over the past week or so, there have been a series of announcements.

Any new leader of a political party tends to face the problem of a policy vacuum when they first take over.

You can’t just stick with what you inherited - especially if your party has just lost a general election, which is the situation Labour was in when Mr Corbyn became leader last year.

So you need to come up with something new, or at least think carefully about whether policies should change. That takes time, if you want to get it right.

But it’s hard not to wonder if the spate of recent announcements doesn’t have something to do with the fact that there’s a leadership contest taking place, in which Mr Corbyn faces a challenge from former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Owen Smith.

Some have come from Mr Corbyn’s leadership campaign, while others were official announcements from the Labour Party (of which, of course, Mr Corbyn remains leader while the contest takes place).

(Image: 2016 Getty Images)

So what’s been announced?

In an interview published on Sunday, Mr Corbyn set out plans to for a national education service, which included ensuring every child has access to preschool facilities. He said there should be a guarantee of class sizes of 30 pupils or fewer in primary schools, and talked about abolishing university tuition fees - and bringing back student maintenance grants “for those who need them”.

On Monday, Mr Corbyn launched Labour’s Workplace 2020 campaign, to improve conditions for workers.

While this is a consultation, it also highlighted a number of Labour policies. The party said it was committed to raising the minimum wage, banning zero hours contracts and giving every worker the same rights from day one - ending the current system where some staff don’t get full employment rights until they have been with their employer for a while.

On Tuesday, Mr Corbyn launched his transport strategy.

This announcement came from his leadership campaign, rather than the Labour Party. But it also included some firm policies, including bringing Britain’s railways into public ownership (by moving franchises to the public sector when they expire) and giving all councils the power to set up publicly run municipal bus companies.

And then on Wednesday, the Labour Party confirmed plans to reverse the Conservative Government’s abolition of student grants and bring back Educational Maintenance Allowances - the modest grants paid to pre-university students aged 16 to 18 - if it wins power at the next General Election.

It also revealed that this would be paid for by increasing corporation tax by around 1.5%.

I suspect there will be more to come before the leadership contest ends. The winner is due to be announced on September 24.

I’m not arguing that all of this is entirely new. For example, Mr Corbyn has made it pretty clear he opposes zero-hour contracts and student tuition fees.

And former Shadow Transport Secretary Lilian Greenwood had spoken previously about bringing rail franchises back under public control. She’s indicated that she’s a bit upset with Mr Corbyn now apparently claiming the policy as its own.

But what is new is the practice of sending out clearly-written statements to the media explaining what Labour or Mr Corbyn’s policies are in a clear, unambiguous way.

That just didn’t happen before.

Is it possible that Mr Corbyn, or someone close to him, is becoming good at media management?

To some people, this might sound dangerously close to heresy. Media management was the sort of thing that Blairites did, involving dark arts, spin doctors and dodgy dossiers.

But there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of PR. Just decide what exactly you want to say (that’s the hard bit), write it down in a reasonably simple format and email it to journalists. There’s no trickery involved, or, at least, there doesn’t have to be.

Mr Corbyn is becoming much more adept at this. Whether voters actually like his policies is another matter, but that’s for them to decide.

The question is whether, assuming he wins the leadership election, he’ll keep it up once the contest is over.