“It’s a bloody travesty – we’ve spent years highlighting the very real evils being perpetrated by this Tory government, but the public have only turned against them over a sodding party,” complains activist and die hard Jeremy Corbyn supporter Stan Stubbard, as Labour finally starts opening up a poll lead over the governing Conservatives, in the wake of the ‘partygate’ scandal currently engulfing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “It’s so disheartening – we’ve tirelessly been campaigning about their attempts to sell off the NHS, take away our right to protest and suppress voting, but the public just ignore us. It’s enough to make you want to give up campaigning for good! The electorate just don’t deserve us!” With the Labour Party riding high in the polls and its current leader enjoying positive public approval ratings, in stark contrast to the situation a couple of years ago, when deeply unpopular former leader Jeremy Corbyn led the party to its worst general election showing since 1935, most would assume that all of its membership and supporters would be rejoicing. For supporters of erstwhile leader Corbyn, however, this apparent success is cause for despair. “Look, the current leadership just don’t understand – we should be winning because we’ve shown that we’re more virtuous than the Tory bastards and have educated the electorate into realising that our ideologically sound socialist platform is the morally correct choice,” explains an exasperated Stubbard. “Not because Boris Johnson has been ambushed by a birthday cake. That’s the trouble with the likes of Keir Starmer – they just think that winning elections, regardless of how, is the be all and end all. For God’s sake, anyone would think that it was all just a popularity contest!”

Some Corbyn supporters have become so disgruntled with the current Labour leadership’s approach that they are considering setting up a rival party, based around the (currently suspended) former leader’s ‘Truth and Justice’ project. “It’s quite clear that Starmer and co just aren’t interested in conducting politics the proper way – through demonstrations, campaigning, hectoring people into doing the right thing and trending stuff on Twitter,” declares thirty two year old activist Colin Poghorn. “Winning elections is of secondary importance – you don’t change things by being in power, as the Labour leadership seem to be naive enough to believe.” According to the Cleethorpes part-time postman, Jeremy Corbyn’s entire political strategy when leader of the Labour Party has been misunderstood and misrepresented. “The man’s a political genius – he saw that actually forming a government was a futile aim. To do so, you have to compromise your socialist principles and, inevitably, the right-wing media will smear you and you’ll be voted out of power, with your achievements quickly reversed,” he claims. “So why waste energy on trying to be popular just to win elections? Instead, you need to campaign on specific issues and build up sufficient support to force the government into making a U-turn. Or at least take credit for any U-turns. That’s how you help people – one issue at a time!”

But others, like Stubbard, aren’t quite ready to give up on the Labour Party just yet and are engaged in one last ditch effort to scupper any prospect of a Labour election victory. “We’re confident of undermining the current leadership before the next election,” he confides. “If we can only get the wider membership to see them for what they are – a bunch of crazy centrists deluded enough to believe that gaining power is the only way to bring in social reform – then we think there’s a real chance of restoring our once and future leader: the saintly Jeremy Corbyn!” Indeed, for Stubbard and his associates, Corbyn truly is a saint, a virtuous leader ‘crucified’ by the media with lies and distortions. “He truly knows what every working class voter wants,” he enthuses. “An allotment to grow their tomatoes, transgender equality, a free Palestine, the end of capitalism and a jam-making facility on every street.” Nonetheless, he does recognise that Corbyn isn’t perfect. “I mean, he gave us a real scare at the 2017 general election,” chuckles Stubbard. “We came dangerously close to being able to form a government there, we managed to reduce the Tories’ majority so much! But thankfully they were able to do that deal with the Northern Irish Unionists to stay in power! But he came good the next time around, ensuring a healthy Tory majority and losing us so many seats that it must surely have killed centrist dreams of winning an election back by at least a generation!”

He and his fellow Corbyn supporters are already busily putting their plans into action, getting party ‘heavyweights’, completely unknown to the public, to resign from the National Executive on ‘principle’, denouncing the current leadership at the same time and simultaneously trending radical hashtags on Twitter. “Some of those hashtags are absolute killers,” says Stubbard. “It’s brilliant – everyone sees them! Only this evening, we got #keirstarmersmells trending for nearly an hour! The damage that soert of thing must be doing to his credibility is unthinkable!” Not surprisingly, many in the Labour Party are exasperated by the antics of Stubbard and Poghorn. “Jesus Christ! What is the matter with these idiots?” asks Labour back bencher Keith Oddnerst. “We finally find an angle of attack the public supports and start making some progress at holding the Tory bastards to account and these loons start playing their infantile games!” Oddnerst finds their activities particularly frustrating in view of the fact that their idol, Jeremy Corbyn, wasn’t even a successful or popular leader. “The idea that he was some kind of paragon of virtue and champion of the working class is utter bollocks,” he opines. “He’s just another privately educated academic failure who likes to play at politics – he and his supporters haven’t a clue what voters want! Mind you, they’ll soon find out if they set up this new party of theirs and go around knocking on doors and, instead of solid policy proposals, they tell people ‘May the Queen of Unicorns bless your journey’!”

Oddnerst’s criticisms are shared by many political experts, who question the efficacy of the Corbyn supporters’ strategies. “Like many armchair activists, they put far too much store in the efficacy of social media to carry their message,” muses Professor Bob Mincer, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the Bracknell Reform School for Young Ladies. “The reality is that trending meaningless hashtags on Twitter achieves nothing: while giving the false impression that these things are garnering support, the reality is that they don’t represent the majority of Twitter users any more than Twitter users as a whole represent the wider electorate.” Mincer also feels that the activists simply don’t grasp the realities of politics. “People rarely vote on the basis of individual policies – a lot of it has to do with image, gut-feeling and perception,” he says. “That’s why ‘partygate’ is so damaging – it validates and reinforces the perception of Johnson as lying, lazy, immoral wastrel. Moreover, the fact is that parties don’t win elections so much as their opponents lose them because of their image, whether it is based in fact or not.” But how does he explain the almost religious fervour which these people bring to their support of Corbyn? “It could be that they are simply idealists and see him as a vehicle for achieving those ideals,” he ventures. “Then again, perhaps it is just a cult of personality and they are a bunch of pathetic tosspots in thrall to an utterly useless serial loser, whose constant failure to actually achieve anything chimes with their own life experiences.”