IT IS standing room only in the Shipley & District Social Club, a working men’s club in a commuter town near Bradford. Over 200 Labour activists have crammed into a backroom more used to 18th birthday parties than political rallies. They have gathered on a drizzly Sunday morning to plot the unseating of Philip Davies, the local Conservative MP, who sits on an unsteady majority of 4,681. Against a backdrop of red balloons, Owen Jones, a left-wing activist and journalist, is pumping up the crowd. “Are we going to hear those magic words: ‘Shipley: Labour gain’?” he asks. The cheers suggest the crowd think they will.

No general election is due in Britain for five years. But the unexpected losses sustained by the Conservative Party in a snap election in June, which Theresa May had called hoping for a landslide, have left the prime minister leading a minority government that could topple at any moment. When asked how long it will last, one Labour front-bencher replies: “Who knows? It’s a bit like having a frail, elderly relative who you know is going to die.”

Energised by the result, Labour resembles a different party to the ragbag institution that had its last rites read many times after electing its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, two years ago. Fresh from winning its biggest share of the vote since 2001—40%—a party that was braced for its third consecutive summer of infighting is instead plotting its path to Downing Street. It needs another 64 seats to win a majority, which is a tall order. But flipping just seven Tory seats would be enough to bring down the government and give Mr Corbyn a shot at forming a ruling coalition. The accidental leader who was expected to become an amusing footnote in the Labour Party’s history, if not the cause of its demise, is now favourite to be the next prime minister.

The next election campaign is already under way. Momentum, a left-wing grassroots organisation founded to support Mr Corbyn’s leadership, is touring seats where Conservative MPs are vulnerable. Those attending its events, who range from middle-aged veterans to political newbies, are given tips on how to canvass and then sent out to spread the new—if rather retro—gospel of the Labour Party.

On St John’s Avenue in Putney, in south-west London, a Momentum battalion is out on patrol. As in Shipley, half the 200-odd people there have never campaigned before. Participants bond by moaning about media coverage of the Labour leader, which they say focuses on trivia such as his sometimes bedraggled appearance. “You never expected Nelson Mandela or Gandhi to dress smartly,” says one retired teacher. St John’s Avenue, where houses change hands for £3m ($4m), is “not natural Labour territory”, admits one of the canvassers. But by the next election it might be. Once a fairly solid Tory seat, Putney came within 1,554 votes of turning Labour in June.

In places like it—rich, educated, socially liberal, keen on the European Union—Labour is on the march. But the forces behind Labour’s progress in these areas are pushing it into retreat elsewhere. If the party has a soft underbelly, then Ashfield is its navel. The former mining constituency has been held by Labour since its creation in 1955, barring a two-year blip in the 1970s. Today Gloria de Piero, a plain-spoken former television journalist, clings on with a majority of just 441. Seven out of ten voters in Ashfield opted for Brexit. “I’m not surprised people in my constituency want to turn the clock back,” says Ms de Piero. People miss what the area used to offer: “Secure jobs, with high status and very well paid.” Ashfield comes 604th out of Britain’s 650 constituencies when it comes to sending people to university. In some towns in the area, you struggle to find a bus home after 5.30pm on a weekend.

To have a chance of forming a government, Labour has to win places like Putney while hanging on to seats such as Ashfield. This is not a new dilemma: Labour has been gaining ground in cosmopolitan, urban areas since 2005, while the Conservatives have done the same in declining towns and rural areas, points out Will Jennings of the University of Southampton. But Brexit has made the equation trickier. Of the seats on Labour’s hit list, the most winnable 64—the number needed for the party to gain a majority—are a near-even mix of those that voted to leave the EU and those that voted to remain (see map). Finding a position that satisfies both camps is proving difficult. Labour’s policy amounts to hard Brexit with a human face: Britain would leave the single market and customs union but, the party insists, in a way that limited damage to businesses, and only after a generous transition period. The free movement of people to and from the EU would end, but what would replace it is left unsaid, beyond a pledge not to “scapegoat migrants”.

Divide and conquer

There is a logic to this approach. As long as Labour offers a slightly milder form of Brexit than the Conservatives, moderate voters have nowhere else to go. (Their unwillingness to turn to the Liberal Democrats was proved in the recent election.) Some shudder at this argument, which reminds them of the party’s neglect under Tony Blair of its working-class core voters, who subsequently left the party in droves. Between 1997 and 2010 the party lost 5m of them, the bulk of whom simply stopped voting. If Labour does nothing to appeal to Europhiles, they too could ditch the party.

This may be a price worth paying. “Working-class abstention would be far more dangerous than losing university towns and London,” argues Matthew Goodwin of the University of Kent, whose research focuses on populism among working-class voters. In June the Tories won a plurality of working-class votes for the first time since Margaret Thatcher was in office, according to YouGov, a polling company. Pledging to deliver Brexit, albeit with softened edges, placates these voters, who mainly backed Leave. They might prefer the full-fat Brexit offered by the Tories, but it would not be enough to tempt them away, believes John McTernan, a former adviser to Mr Blair who now works for PSB Research, another pollster. “The north hates the Tories more than it hates the EU,” he says bullishly.

If voters are split by Brexit, they are divided again over Labour’s leader. When Lloyd Russell-Moyle first went canvassing in Brighton Kemptown this year, he found that the name Jeremy Corbyn elicited the same amount of bile as that of Labour’s previous leader. But it also provoked rare excitement. He ran out of Labour posters in 30 minutes. “In 2015 no one came running out their house chanting ‘Oh, Ed Miliband’,” says Mr Russell-Moyle, who ended up winning the marginal south-coast seat from the Tories with a 9,868 majority.

Mr Corbyn has become an unlikely icon. His name rings out at music festivals, where his 68-year-old face appears on T-shirts mocked up in the style of Barack Obama’s “Hope” posters. Last year 18 couples in England and Wales named their baby boy Corbyn. A raucous online hit squad of supporters spreads his message on social media, revelling in the oddly laddish tone that surrounds a politician with an interest in municipal manhole covers. Since the election Mr Corbyn has zoomed past Mrs May in popularity (see chart). The under-25s now back Labour over the Tories by nearly three to one. Ask Mr Corbyn’s fans why they like him and the same word comes up repeatedly: principled. This has served him well as he engages in the ideological gymnastics required of any politician. This year Mr Corbyn and his team have become more skilled in triangulation, as well as the more brutal side of politics. In the run-up to the election, terrorist attacks in Manchester and London, in which 30 people were murdered, threatened to damage the chances of Mr Corbyn, who is seen as weak on security. But he quickly affirmed his support for the police’s shoot-to-kill policy—on which he had previously sent mixed messages—and Labour deftly turned the story into a question of public spending on the police, which has been cut under the Tories. “It was ruthless,” says one Labour critic, admiringly. Mr Corbyn has also overcome the awkward contrast between some of his own views and those of his party. He is a former vice-chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who has long campaigned to scrap Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons. Yet his manifesto promised to keep them. Six years ago Mr Corbyn labelled NATO a “danger to world peace”, but his party is committed to staying in the alliance. (“Jeremy has been on a journey,” explained the shadow foreign secretary.) Cries of hypocrisy do not stick. “He compromised, like any other politician—on free movement, on Trident, shoot-to-kill—but he never looked compromised,” says one Labour MP. Labour’s policymaking process, in which the big decisions are taken at the party’s annual conference, creates a firewall between the leader and any controversial policies. The promise to maintain Trident was passed by members, allies of Mr Corbyn are quick to point out. He is simply doing their bidding.

Preparing for government

Nor do voters seem much perturbed by Mr Corbyn’s exotic positions on foreign policy, an area which seems to be regarded by Labour MPs as a sandpit they are happy to let Mr Corbyn play in as long as it does not become an issue on the doorstep. The Labour leader’s passion for Latin America—he speaks fluent Spanish and has a cat called el Gato—includes defending the legacy of Hugo Chávez. But Venezuelan affairs come far down the list of British voters’ priorities, as does Mr Corbyn’s close relationship with Sinn Fein in the 1980s, which seems to have been forgiven, or simply ignored, especially by young voters.

Voters’ acceptance of a far-left candidate is also due to an unspoken element of Labour’s radicalism: its moderation. Andrew Fisher, the main author of Mr Corbyn’s manifesto, wrote a pamphlet in 2014 that suggested nationalising all banks and introducing capital controls. By comparison the manifesto itself was rather tepid. “It contains a seed of radicalism,” says one Labour adviser, almost apologetically. “It’s the first step.”

For the first time in a generation, Labour proposed bringing utilities such as gas, water and electricity, as well as the railways, back under public ownership. University tuition fees would be scrapped. It pledged to increase the number of workers’ co-operatives and set up a National Investment Bank to pump £250bn into small businesses and research and development. Beyond that, Mr Corbyn’s published vision for Britain reads like that of his predecessor, Mr Miliband, only with the handbrake taken off. Aides from the Miliband era recall painstakingly moving money around to free up £2.5bn of extra funding for the NHS. Mr Corbyn promises an extra £30bn by, among other things, raising income tax for the top 5% of earners.

Brexit, coupled with seven years of austerity, may have washed away voters’ squeamishness about public spending by a Labour government. “If you are going to piss away £250bn by leaving the single market, another £11bn on [abolishing] tuition fees doesn’t matter,” says Tom Baldwin, a former adviser to Mr Miliband. “It’s another round of drinks on the Titanic.” Considering that Mr Fisher, the man behind the manifesto, once labelled Mr Miliband’s cabinet “the most abject collection of absolute shite”, the overlap in policies—from a crackdown on companies that are late to pay their suppliers, to a higher minimum wage—is remarkable.

Where Mr Corbyn’s policies do differ is in their clarity. During its latest term in government, in 2005-10, Labour was addicted to technocratic, targeted solutions. Policies such as tax credits—wage top-ups for the low-paid—were effective but incomprehensible. In contrast, Mr Corbyn proposes “bright, primary-colour policies”, says Marcus Roberts of YouGov. Ideas such as scrapping tuition fees and providing free lunches for primary school pupils are clear and understandable, even if they make wonks wail at the thought of spraying money at the middle class. The tactic is working. Some 28% of Labour voters cite the party’s policies as the main reason for backing it, according to YouGov. For the Conservatives, the number is just 10%.

Critics argue that the programme is still dated, harking back to a 1970s Britain. Yet a planned hike in corporation tax, to 26%, would put it back to near where it was at the start of David Cameron’s tenure, in 2010. Tuition fees were introduced only in 1998. The privatisation of the railways began only in 1994. “People can be very ahistorical about these things,” says Mr Miliband. Most of Labour’s policies would not look out of place in the programme of a typical centre-left party in northern Europe. “It’s unradical in the grand scheme of history,” says Mr Russell-Moyle, the Brighton MP. “But it’s radical in the here and now of British politics.”

Can Labour go the distance? It sits just above the Conservatives in most polls, which put the two parties on a little over 40% each. A summer of bungling and bickering from the government has allowed a slight air of hubris to permeate the opposition. After two years of criticism from within the party, Mr Corbyn’s supporters have been on a summer-long victory lap. This attitude worries some observers. “There is a dangerous internal narrative, that Labour’s qualified success at the election was more down to its strengths than the Conservatives’ weaknesses,” says Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, a Labour-aligned think-tank.

The last push

Winning the additional 64 seats required to form a majority government will be difficult. Although Labour’s vote share in June was 11 percentage points higher than in 2010, this resulted in a mere four extra seats. The party is piling up votes where it is already dominant, points out Stephen Kinnock, a Labour MP.

One route back to power goes through Scotland. It provided an electoral life-jacket in 2010, when Labour won 41 of 59 seats there, even as it was hammered south of the border. The rise of the Scottish National Party changed all that. Labour now has just seven Scottish seats, behind both the SNP and the Tories. Rebuilding this base will be a slog. But Labour made gains in Scotland earlier this year, and now eyes 20 Scottish seats where it is fewer than 4,000 votes away from victory.

In England, some in the party fear that Mr Corbyn’s appeal is too narrow, particularly in the post-industrial towns across the midlands and parts of the north where Labour is already struggling to hold seats. Mr Corbyn still repels a lot of voters: the party itself is more popular than its leader, according to YouGov. An unknown number of people voted for Labour in June only because they were confident he would not become prime minister. The Conservatives are holding their own, despite running a dreadful election campaign and leading a kneecapped government. All this means that plenty of Labour MPs retain some scepticism about the Corbyn project.

Coming to the boil

But Labour’s leadership is getting better at sidelining potential saboteurs. The threat of deselection, in which the local Labour Party kicks out its MP, has been levelled at Corbyn-sceptic MPs. Momentum has nearly 30,000 members, an anorak’s understanding of the party rule-book and a low opinion of the Labour MPs who tried to oust Mr Corbyn in 2016. In return for delivering hundreds of people to campaign at the weekend, it wants grassroots members to have a bigger say in how the party is run.

Next week’s party conference, in Brighton, is expected to approve a plan to add more local members to the party’s National Executive Committee, along with more trade unionists. It is also likely to reduce the number of MPs needed to approve leadership candidates, which will reduce the power of MPs to block a radical successor to Mr Corbyn. Local parties will be given a freer rein to select prospective MPs than they were in the previous election, providing the chance to place Corbyn-supporters as candidates. Slowly but surely, Mr Corbyn is taking control of the party. If he does not lead Labour into government, the next person to try to do so will probably be someone like him.

For now, peace has broken out as both left and right of the party find themselves closer to power than they had expected. “When you are on the up, and you can smell power—and decay on the other side—it brings unity,” says Mr McTernan. The MPs who tried to remove Mr Corbyn last year did so in the belief that he was destroying the party, endangering their jobs and condemning Britain to a generation of Tory rule. June’s election proved that view wrong. One strident critic of the Labour leader says that he would not have won his seat without distancing himself from Mr Corbyn, but admits that he would have lost without the extra votes that Mr Corbyn brought in. For MPs on the party’s right, Mr Corbyn resembles Homer Simpson’s description of alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

It is certainly hard to imagine that the backroom of the Shipley & District Social Club would be ram-packed on a damp Sunday morning without him. “This is bigger than anything during the campaign,” says Richard Dunbar, a local councillor, nodding to the packed room. “Even on election day.” When the next election comes, Labour will be out to win.