Jeremy Corbyn has beaten ridiculous odds, and withstood the most savage smear-mongering abuse I've ever seen a man take without cracking, and delivered a result that the mainstream media would have ridiculed if anyone would have suggested that Labour would make significant gains back in April when the election was called.
With an extra week of campaigning I'm sure Corbyn could even have won it, such was the way the tide was turning in his direction.
All of us who fought for a better, fairer Britain with a sane investment-based economic strategy can be rightly proud of our efforts to defy the odds.
However we must also be deeply concerned that 13.6 million people actually voted for this absolutely cringeworthy coward of a woman.
42.3% almost matched Tony Blair's share of the vote in 1997 when people voted in their droves against a decaying sleaze infested corpse of a Tory government.
In 2017 it was so obviously the Tory party in decay (7 years of failed austerity targets, 7 years of failed immigration targets, the worst 7 years of wage growth on record, an absolute dud of a Prime Minister, one U-turn after another ...) but ...
42.3% is the highest Tory share of the vote since Margaret Thatcher stormed to power in 1979!
Just look at the state of this:
Did you cringe so hard your teeth hurt? I certainly did.Theresa May promised again and again that if she lost six seats, Jeremy Corbyn would be PM. Last night she lost at least 12. http://pic.twitter.com/I3FSLu6AEt— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 9, 2017
Theresa May refused to come out and debate the other party leaders, dodged even the most mundane of questions (consistently prefacing her evasive non-answers with "I've been clear that ..."), and presented the worst shambles of a Tory manifesto anyone has ever seen.
She preferred hiding in her ruthlessly enforced Tory safe spaces, repeating
the same lamentable gibberish over and again to mini-crowds of sycophantic Tory ghouls who actually ooohed and aaahed along as if the piteous drivel their leader was spouting constituted some kind of fabulous entertainment.
So what we have to ask is how so many people were enthused to actually vote for this travesty of a woman.
There are the Tory tribalists who would vote for them even if the party leader was Jimmy Savile or Harold Shipman (about 30% of voters judging by their low-water marks in 1997 and 2001). We don't need to worry about their motivations because they'll never be convinced to give up their militant Tory faith.
The huge mainstream media smear-mongering campaign against Jeremy Corbyn obviously played a part in this Tory turnout, as did the £millions they spent on dark ads and the unprecedented spam-bombing of Scotland's letterboxes.
Then there's the mindless UKIP flag-followers who voted for her because they liked hearing her say "Brexit" a lot, and lacked the mental faculties to even consider the fact that she's been a dreadful Brexit leader with her dreadful antagonistic posturing and her endless delaying tactics (which the whole election was yet another example of).
Still there must be people out there who aren't simply gullible people who believe all the crap that gets shoved through their letterbox, spammed into their inbox, or spewed into their social media feed. The maths doesn't add up if you try to account for these people as flag-followers can't even realise that the flag they're following has been hijacked by a shameless political opportunist.So where did all these new Tory voters spring from, and why did they vote Tory?
It can't have been for the policies, because the manifesto was as malicious as it was shambolic.
Understanding how people came to believe that this dreadful walking cringe of a woman is somehow a worthy leader is hugely important, because if we don't know how they came to believe such palpable nonsense, it's going to be very difficult to snap them out of such woefully poor political judgement at the next important vote (whenever that might be).
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