JEREMY CORBYN may have lost the general election but his cult grows, regardless. There are Corbyn T-shirts all over the place, as well as more exotic items of clothing: David Cameron, Britain’s former prime minister, was photographed at a pop festival, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, half-embracing a female reveller who was wearing a cape with Corbyn’s name on the back, encircled by a heart. A mural of his face can be found in Islington. Siobhan Freegard, the founder of channelmum.com, reports that “Corbyn is the stand-out naming trend this year”, with 50% of parents saying they would be willing to consider naming their child after the MP for Islington North.

The great question of British politics is whether this is too much of a good thing. Is this adulation a bubble that will burst, leaving trustafarians with embarrassing bits of clothing and children with awkward names? Or is it the British equivalent of the posters and T-shirts that proliferated before Barack Obama’s first victory? There are good psephological reasons for thinking that Labour’s 40% score in June might be a high-water mark. The Conservative campaign was about as bad as you can get, a presidential effort with a nothing at its heart. Lots of people voted for Mr Corbyn precisely because they did not think he could win. They wanted to curtail Theresa May’s “Brexit means Brexit” triumphalism, not install a far-leftist in Downing Street.

There are also signs that Mr Corbyn’s Teflon coating is wearing thin. On August 7th he returned from a cycling holiday in Croatia to face a barrage of questions about Venezuela. Why is a country that he once praised as a land of milk and honey turning into a giant gulag? Why had he said nothing while the regime beat and killed dissenters? Mr Corbyn eventually broke his silence only to say he condemned violence on “all sides”, seemingly oblivious to his own recent tweet that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This came on the heels of two other embarrassments. He back-pedalled on his promise to forgive all past student loans on the ground that, even in Labour’s free-spending Britain, writing off £100bn might be a bit irresponsible. And he clashed with the pro-European wing of his party when he insisted that Britain would leave the single market when it left the European Union.

Further skeletons lurk in Mr Corbyn’s closet. He has spent his life forgiving people their nastiness so long as they are hostile to the Great Satan of the United States. And there are more potential fissures in his coalition. The sort of people who ooh over him at Glastonbury will start aahing if their taxes rocket. But anyone inclined to think that Britain is approaching peak Corbyn or even that, as Country Squire Magazine, a website, argues, “peak Corbyn has passed”, should consider three things.

The first is that peak Corbyn will be determined by the Conservative Party rather than the Labour Party or Venezuela’s ruling elite. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010 either as the dominant party in a coalition or in their own right. Even in the best of times, voters tire of long-serving ruling parties, blaming them for everything from bad weather to noisy roadworks. These have not been the best of times. The Tories are far more divided than Labour over Brexit—in particular, their “ultras” are more extreme—and, as the party of government, their divisions will be more damaging both to themselves and to the country.

Second, a few fiff-faffs over communist tyrants aside, Mr Corbyn is acquitting himself quite well as party leader. He is forcing Blairites and Brownites to bend the knee with a judicious mixture of promises of promotion and threats of a beating by his praetorian guard, Momentum. In June Labour humiliated Mrs May despite the fact that most of its MPs thought Mr Corbyn was leading them to disaster. Next time they will be more behind him. His refusal to operate a pairing system (whereby MPs from opposing parties agree to cancel each other out by abstaining from voting) shows a good understanding of guerrilla tactics. Tory MPs will have to turn up for every vote to save the government from defeat, becoming increasingly exhausted, tired and fractious, whereas opposition MPs will be able to pick their moments.

The third reason is that a combination of economic forces, both long-term and short-term, favour Mr Corbyn. Brexit and its attendant uncertainties will further weaken Britain’s already weakening economy. That will give voters more incentive to punish the party that has “banged on” about Europe for decades and seems to be doing a dismal job of handling the divorce settlement. The hollowing out of the middle classes, as salaried workers see their jobs threatened by artificial intelligence and globalisation and their dreams of home ownership destroyed by rising property prices, is increasing the number of people who are sympathetic to Corbyn-style socialism.

London pride

The clearest signs of this can be seen in the country’s most globalised city, London, where Labour has gained 11 seats since 2010. Having lost such previously deep-blue seats as Kensington and Battersea in the latest election, the Tories could easily lose Chingford & Woodford Green, where Iain Duncan Smith’s majority fell from 8,386 to 2,438, and Uxbridge & South Ruislip, where Boris Johnson’s majority fell from 10,695 to 5,034, in the next one.

Mr Corbyn also has perhaps the most important thing in politics on his side: the idea of “change” and “hope”. People are fed up with stagnant living standards. They are fed up with squabbling politicians. And they are fed up with the rich seeming to be held to different standards from the poor. The Tories are right to argue that this “changey-hopey” stuff is nonsense. Corbynism will make the country poorer, the infrastructure shoddier and political life more rancorous. But if they cannot go beyond criticising Mr Corbyn’s policies to offering a vision of a better future themselves, they might just as well whistle in the wind.