Corbyn sounds like a dreadful town, dresses like a catalogue model for the Sue Ryder shop and won’t look significantly different when he’s been dead for a week. It took him so long to bring out his reshuffle statement that people were counting his milk bottles. The Tories have been offering us a cocktail of incompetence and malice and Labour haven’t done anything to draw attention to it. It’s been like watching Mesut Özil drop perfect crosses on to the head of an increasingly frustrated Stephen Hawking. Even Labour MPs must secretly wish they could stop knocking Corbyn and focus their attack on their real enemy, the party membership.

And yet, who doesn’t want to see Corbyn elected? Can you think of anything more ridiculous than a man of principle being inexplicably elected to high office? It’ll be like a Peter Sellers movie. Sure, he’ll be crushed under the heel of international finance, but I for one look forward to his glorious six-day premiership. His brief reign will be a high point for modern Britain, a time that we will commemorate every year by leaving ironic poppies balanced on the lip of the missile crater where his house used to be, a time we will reminisce about fondly during the five-minute socialisation breaks when they lower the dividing walls between our work cubes.

This weekend’s interview with Andrew Marr was, at least, refreshingly straightforward. Corbyn said he’d like to see talks with Isis. Almost immediately the shadow chancellor said he couldn’t imagine anyone having talks with Isis. I applaud Corbyn’s aims but at this stage I’d like to see him open up a back channel of communication with his shadow cabinet. He said he’d keep Trident, but get rid of the nuclear warheads. This is classic Corbyn. He’s using his experience from the allotment and what he’s saying is, let’s put the nuclear weapons in the shed. He’s not throwing them out, and he’s not giving them away. He’s putting them in a cardboard box, and sticking them on the top shelf. We know where they are if we need them, but also they’re up high, so no one’s going to stumble across them and get hurt. He added that he “cannot see circumstances where you would use nuclear weapons”. Might I suggest that he tunes into Lip Sync Battle on Channel 5.

There’s been a thread of coverage implying that Corbyn is a decent guy but he clearly doesn’t understand how the world works. Ignoring the fact that for the majority of people, it doesn’t. Corbyn is in a unique position: he knows that the media is trying to portray him as slightly mad, but can’t mention this without sounding completely insane. Coverage is undoubtedly biased. Take, for example, the recent reshuffle, which forced the media to conclude that he was both weak and ruthless. Corbyn hiring more women than men was ignored, whereas Cameron hiring a one-third female cabinet was hailed as a triumph for feminism. In any case, feeling good about ourselves simply for allowing some kind of plurality in public life probably means that we’re a fairly dreadful country. Canada has just appointed a cabinet 50% female with indigenous, Sikh and disabled members. And that’s Canada, a country with all the daring forward-thinking of a defrosting lasagne.

Pat McFadden – a man who said government actions couldn’t be blamed for angry marginalised groups – is still angrily shouting that it’s unfair his party have marginalised him. McFadden was sacked for saying terrorists have 100% responsibility for their own actions, and has since used his whingeing, like some kind of high-pitched mating call to the news networks, to bemoan the fact he’s been held fully responsible for his actions. It feels as if we currently know what every Labour MP thinks about everything – I know more about what each Labour MP thinks than I learn about next door’s cat in an hour’s phone call with my mother. Emily Thornberry seems a good appointment: at least she lives in the modern world; she’s quote-tweeting and using emojis while her colleagues are desperately sexting in the search box. Really Thornberry should be shadow minister for youth – though I guess as shadow defence minister she’ll meet plenty of our young people as they career towards the Commons in ticking vests.

The Labour party has, from the beginning, been made up of diverse factions; that’s its beauty – asking it to become cohesive is like trying to find one shampoo that will care for the hair of everybody in Angelina Jolie’s house. Until recently, Labour politicians have been scared to tell anyone their opinions as they had to have one that appealed to every single person in the country. Under Ed Miliband the current manifesto would just say: “Good Adele’s back, isn’t it?” A certain nostalgia in the parliamentary party is inevitable: it’s hard to deny Blair helped to create a powerful movement. Unfortunately that movement was Islamic State.

At some point Corbyn will have to talk to Murdoch, and he ought to be wary. There’s a reason we’ve not heard from the guy who threw a pie at him. Murdoch will have muttered: “I want him dealt with … ironically.” Then by the time the chloroform wore off he’d have had barely enough strength to pull back his quilt of congealing custard, crawl out of his pastry coffin and burn his hands banging impotently on the inside of a giant oven door. Does Murdoch insist on meeting leaders in person so there’s no record? I reckon with some it’s to see if their pelt would make an acceptable rug. It’s only Blair’s lack of back hair that means in 20 years he won’t be spreadeagled in front of a roaring fire, its flames reflected in his gleaming teeth.

Of course, the representation of Labour in corporate media is going to be everything Cameron could hope for because he, Murdoch and pretty much everybody they know works for the same boss: financial and corporate interests. Cameron is middle management and Murdoch is more senior, something high up in their PR department. Another problem for Corbyn is the intrinsic conservatism of the concision demanded by news shows: it’s difficult to explain why an ingrained assumption is wrong in a soundbite, and it’s to his credit that he can’t seem to be bothered trying. Then there’s the overwhelming lack of context in our news coverage. How many stories about the US’s recent deal with Iran mention that the US overthrew the Iranian government in a 1953 CIA-backed coup? There’s bias there – no doubt if Russia had sponsored a coup in Iran it would have made it into the coverage – but there’s another reason this happens. Removing context makes it much easier to engage readers with emotions such as surprise, or outrage. Our news media instinctively removes context, because “look at this inexplicable shit that just happened” sells more papers than the more depressing “look at this inevitable shit that will no doubt keep happening”.

Faced with this level of inherent bias, the rhetoric of anti-austerity is failing in a few ways. The first is that it tries to construct a persuasive moral argument against a case for austerity that hasn’t been framed morally. It has been very effectively framed as a necessary evil. In any case, I’ve always found the idea of “speaking truth to power” faintly ridiculous. Powerful people are generally quite well aware of what they are doing and – should you ever make it past their security – will respond to your truth-speaking with a look that says: “you don’t know the half of it”. The thing you can rely on about self-interested people is that they won’t really be interested in you. They don’t care, and you’re not going to find the right form of words that suddenly makes them care.

Another failure in leftwing rhetoric is that it imagines that decades of cultural programming can be undone by retweeting an empowering slogan. And there’s a misunderstanding of the nature of the mainstream media: a stubborn belief among activists that something that serves a fairly rigid set of fixed interests might somehow be co-opted to serve their cause. There was a nice example of this in the referendum campaign when yes campaigners staged a protest outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters about BBC bias, then complained when it wasn’t shown on the news.

It seems that, increasingly, we all want to keep our message simple. It’s as if we’ve stopped grading ideas in terms of usefulness and moved on to shareability. Anyone explaining that the Sun’s role in British politics is primarily about influencing elections, while broadsheets are more often used to make the case for wars, will receive some kind of version of: “But Murdoch’s an arsehole. End of.” And yes, he is an arsehole, but the exact type of arsehole is quite important. For example, I think Murdoch’s position on climate change might be quite a significant thing to understand, especially as he recently bought National Geographic, although possibly he just needed to own something that still showed tits.

Rather than honing ideas until they are so simple they can fit in the little rectangles of social media, or standardising them to fit the assumptions of television, maybe we should all be talking about more sophisticated things face to face. It’s no surprise to me that Syriza and Podemos consciously built social networks in food banks and other collective efforts. Possibly the row within the Labour party is indicative of a general change: an old guard that sees society as cohesive groups being replaced by a generation that sees movements as individuals choosing to work together. After the general election, I doubted that anyone would have any hope left at all, any desire to put aside their differences to organise novel methods of resistance. One thing Corbyn’s election showed is that there are a lot of people out there with hope. I very much doubt that it can survive the draughty meeting halls, cherished hatreds and bureaucracy of the Labour party.

• This article was amended on 19 January 2016 to delete a passage that should have been removed before publication as part of the editing process.