Corbyn’s behavior in the aftermath of his triumph only reinforced Tory confidence—and the gloom emanating from Labour’s ancien régime. Rather than attempt some sort of reconciliation with the parliamentary party, he appointed one of its most left-wing and least clubbable members: his old friend and comrade John McDonnell, the man who headed his campaign, as shadow chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), the second most important job on the Labour front bench.

McDonnell is far cleverer, but less diplomatic than his leader. Despite Corbyn’s undisguised appreciation (let’s leave it at that) of those who use force for the right cause, and despite the way that those who oppose him have long found themselves at the wrong end of unpleasant treatment (not least, these days, online), he has, by eschewing overtly violent language, preserved a convenient distance from his rougher supporters. McDonnell is not so fastidious. He has in the past called for the lynching of a Conservative minister (he was angry, he said), and joked about the assassination of Thatcher. He often seems more enthused by “direct action” (“what we used to call insurrection”) than navigating the pathways of parliamentary democracy. As for his intriguing relationship with Irish Republicanism, well, “it’s about time we started honoring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of [hunger striker] Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.” McDonnell’s democratic credentials were not enhanced by a 2006 listing of his “most significant” intellectual influences: Marx (whom Corbyn has dubbed a “great economist”), Lenin and Trotsky.

Seumas Milne, the journalist Corbyn appointed as his communications director, and, in many respects ideological enforcer, is an apologist of sorts for the old Soviet empire and something of a Stalin man: he has argued that the Father of Nations’ misdeeds have been overstated, or at least misrepresented. Meanwhile it emerged that Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s newly-minted head of policy, had (ahead of the 2015 election) urged voters in one constituency to opt for the (anarchist) Class War Party rather than Labour. Fisher was suspended, but with Corbyn giving him his full support, swiftly returned to work.

Margaret Beckett has reproached Corbyn’s inner circle for operating “as if they are not part of the Labour Party.” Winning a general election, she fretted, just didn’t seem to matter to them.

Once again, the ‘moron’ missed the point. Corbyn and his clique are playing that long game. The first step is taking over the Labour Party, half of the duopoly (nationalist complications in the Celtic fringe aside) that has largely driven British politics since 1945. The UK’s combination of “first past the post” voting with a purely parliamentary system (there’s no room for a Macron) hugely favors the existing party structure. There’s been a trickle of moderate Labour MPs leaving parliament since Corbyn’s victory. Some appear to have abandoned electoral politics altogether. Understandably so: The lessons of history are clear—the likelihood of a new party making a breakthrough is close to zero.

Corbyn’s team must know that Labour, as the only ‘real’ alternative to the Conservatives, will someday surely win a general election. If by then the Corbynistas dominate the party, the country will be theirs to rule as they see fit. They have thus concentrated on gaining control of Labour’s institutional structure. Sometimes this is just a matter of placing the right apparatchik in the right job, but sometimes it takes votes. Underlining the extent to which Labour belongs to Corbyn, his candidate (a former Unite official) has been elected as the new general secretary, and Team Corbyn has won majorities on the National Executive Committee (the party’s governing body), as well—God is in the details—as on the more obscure Conference Arrangements Committee (which helps shape the annual party conference).

And Labour’s MPs? Finally stung into action by what they saw as Corbyn’s failure to fight hard enough for the UK’s continued membership of the EU during the June 2016 referendum, they passed an overwhelming, if nonbinding, motion of no confidence in their leader. Corbyn ignored it, maintaining that his mandate derived from his party, not his MPs. A little later, he saw off a formal challenge to his leadership with a larger share of the vote than in 2015, proof—as if any were needed—that his party is not going to unseat him any time soon. Since then, some Corbynskeptic MPs have decided that they love Big Brother after all—a turnaround made easier by fear of unemployment, hope of advancement and Labour’s unexpectedly strong showing in the election the Tories called (and then nearly threw away last year).

But, to the left, many MPs remain—not unreasonably—suspect. In September 2017, there was a reduction in the percentage of the parliamentary party required to nominate a leadership candidate from that awkward 15 percent to 10 percent. Pressure on Corbynskeptic MPs has revved up at the constituency level, not least due to Momentum, a far-left group that emerged from Corbyn’s 2015 campaign with the aim of bolstering his leadership—Red Guards with a whiff of the Praetorian and a hint of the Alinsky about them. Now some 40,000 strong, Momentum has developed into a significant force in a party (its founder, Jon Lansman, was elected onto the National Executive Committee in January) it seems intent on radicalizing still further. Its members include skilled social media warriors but also those prepared to devote the time and, maybe, the venom it takes (there are persistent accusations of intimidation and bullying, online and, occasionally, off), to steer constituency parties—many of which are already more left-leaning than their MP—closer to the new orthodoxy, in some cases by picking Momentum-approved candidates for local elections and, of course, parliament.

More moderate Labour MPs must worry that ‘deselection‘ (as their party’s candidate for the next election) looms, leaving them facing the prospect of unemployment. Deselection is a powerful threat—that’s why Unite’s McCluskey, irritated by Labour MPs objecting to the undeniable strain of anti-Semitism (oh yes, there’s that too) running through some of the Corbynista left—recently wrote that he understood the “growing demand for mandatory reselection,” not the first time that he has mentioned this cudgel. Making every Labour MP go through this process would be an effective way of either purging rebels or bringing them to heel. For now, Corbyn’s political secretary is studying the party’s rulebook with a view to investigating how ‘party democracy’ can be improved. Mandatory selection might easily turn out to be one of her recommendations: MPs, said Corbyn in January this year, “should all be accountable all the time,” an innocuous statement except when it is not.

For their part, Conservatives went into 2017 feeling optimistic about their chances against a party that had so firmly turned its back on what was reckoned to be the center ground. The shock vote for Brexit had unquestionably thrown the Tory Party into disarray in June 2016 (Prime Minister Cameron had announced that he was stepping down), but Labour’s predicament appeared to be even worse. Within days of the referendum much of the shadow cabinet (and a slew of more junior shadow ministers) resigned, and then came that vote of no confidence.

Home Secretary (interior minister) Theresa May, wrongly seen as competent—but rightly regarded as the only realistic candidate after Boris Johnson sank without trace—speedily succeeded David Cameron as Tory leader and prime minister. When, in April 2017, she called a snap general election, the Conservatives were very comfortably ahead in the polls. The only question appeared to be by how much May could build on Cameron’s modest majority.

In the event, she wiped it out. May fought a campaign that was not only tin-eared and technically incompetent (there is this thing called social media, Theresa) but also actively self-destructive. For a party to issue a manifesto proposing a policy—quickly, accurately and lethally labeled a dementia tax—that targeted the savings of some of its most loyal supporters was… unwise. May managed to hang on in office thanks to an arrangement with Ulster’s Democratic Unionist Party, but she surrendered the political initiative to Labour, an initiative that, despite falling short of expectations in this year’s local elections, it essentially still enjoys.

There were scraps of comfort for the Tories: their slice of the vote was the highest since the election held in the afterglow of the Falklands War. However, the increase (over 9 percent) in Labour’s share was the party’s best since the 1945 landslide that tossed Winston Churchill out of office—suggesting that there was more to their success than May’s blunders. With hindsight, the way Corbyn had swept to the Labour leadership was a warning that was ignored. At the time his victory was widely regarded as a temporary aberration rather than understood for what it was: an indication of a wider, deeper discontent.

That misreading led the Tories (and many in Labour too) to assume that Corbyn’s party was unelectable, a calculation that rested firstly on presumptions about the electorate that proved to be false. Corbyn’s terrorist associations were ancient history to many voters, even if they knew about them in the first place. His fondness for foreign despots also mattered less than it should. To borrow from Neville Chamberlain’s infamous formulation, Brits showed little interest in the politics of “far away” countries involving “people of whom [they] know nothing.” Cuba? Nice beaches. In the early stages of the 2017 election, Unite (who else?) lent Andrew Murray, its chief of staff, to help toughen up Labour’s faltering campaign (which he duly did). A former journalist for the communist Morning Star (where Corbyn has been a frequent contributor), Murray had only just switched from the Communist Party to Labour. As if that was not enough, and adding some variety to by now routine attitudes to the Soviet past among some of Corbyn’s closest associates, Murray had expressed “solidarity” with “Peoples’ Korea.” Despite a brief media furor, none of this seemed to bother the voters either. This February Corbyn recruited Murray, who remains with Unite, as a part-time consultant.