text: It's not natural Labour territory. The party has lost every election here since 1950. At this year's general election, the Conservatives were returned with an 18,000 majority.
  But the people of Chelmsford, in Essex, were queuing round the block outside the city's civic theatre to hear Jeremy Corbyn.
  If this had been a football crowd, there would have been purveyors of hot pies. If it had been an audience waiting to the see the latest cinema blockbuster, there would be popcorn vendors.
  But it's the 87th Corbyn rally of the Labour leadership campaign. So the products being paraded at the venue were food for thought - newspapers from parties and factions to the left, or on the left, of Labour - Socialist Worker, Socialist Appeal, Labour Briefing.
  There were almost as many people here as there have been Corbyn rebellions against his own party leadership. So why were 500 giving up their evening to hear the veteran left winger?
  "He's a breath of fresh air," says Helen Davenport, a teacher who had left the Labour party for the Greens. "I gave up hope," she says. "But now there's an alternative. I like his ideas on renationalising rail and he has a more sympathetic policy on immigration. He has the wisdom of Tony Benn."
  Sasha McLoughlin agrees: "It's the first time a Labour leader has represented me in years. You vote Labour because that's what you do but it's so exciting to have a leftwing leader, not a Tory in disguise."
  Further up the line was Gerard Darcy. He says he wasn't a natural Corbyn supporter but found him to be "straight-talking".
  He went on: "There's no artifice. No spin. The other candidates are preened, moulded. He looks like a 70s sociology lecturer but people are now in to the issues, not the image - no one cares about what his smile looks like."
  He says Andy Burnham would be "excellent" but is now his second choice.
  And the phenomenon that is Corbynmania continued inside the venue. In the media scrum that now surrounds him everywhere he goes, he was asked by Finnish television to give advice to their social democrats, and by Le Monde to comment on French President Francois Hollande's move to the right.
  Incidentally, he responds that Hollande "hasn't felt sufficiently able to challenge austerity".
  Not a criticism he would level at himself. So how has a left-winger who had languished on the backbenches  - someone to whom Ed Miliband's former chief of staff Lucy Powell admits to never having spoken - now become something of an international celebrity?
  He seems quite bemused yet nonplussed by the attention. He needed the support of 35 Labour MPs to get on the ballot and he points out he only got enough nominations with just one minute fifteen seconds to the deadline. This was no long-standing left-wing conspiracy.
  He had to "max out" his credit card to get the campaign started and while he has received donations from trade unions such as Unite and communications workers' union the CWU, he appeared to have caught an anti-austerity zeitgeist, with his targets for "crowdfunding" from individuals exceeded.
  Irrespective of his politics, he does look and sound different from his Oxbridge educated opponents, all of whom were advisers to Labour politicians before becoming MPs.
  He's a generation older, for a start. At 66, he was a Haringey councillor in the 70s and 80s before the other contenders even went to university.
  "I have got very few qualifications," he tells me -  he dropped out of North London Polytechnic - "but I have a fascination of reading and read a lot. I spent a lot of time in the school library and the local library and I have this view that everyone I meet knows something I don't know and we can learn from each other."
  He was weaned on socialist literature. Not for him the Famous Five: "My mother gave me the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to read." This was Robert Tressell's novel of working class life in Mugsborough - or Hastings - before World War One, and the philanthropists of the title are the people who are all too willing to do back-breaking work for the benefit of their "betters".
  His maths-teacher mother also gave him the diaries of George Orwell. He spent two years on voluntary service overseas in the Caribbean, but first became active in politics in Shropshire.
  He founded the Wrekin Young Socialists - the youth wing of the Labour Party -  in the mid-60s. He was the organisation's secretary and regularly attracted 40 to 50 youthful activists to Sunday night meetings.
  He produced a magazine and organised protests against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War - perhaps the perfect pedigree for someone who would go on to form the Stop the War coalition with CND stalwart Monsignor Bruce Kent in 2001 - though it's worth remembering that was initially a protest against intervention in Afghanistan, not Iraq.
  He is not in principle against the deployment of British troops but cannot think of current circumstances where he would do so.
  He first successfully fought his Islington North in seat in 1983, when the party went down to a disastrous defeat nationally under Michael Foot's leadership on a platform of unilateral disarmament and withdrawal from the EU.
  Labour had moved decisively to the left in London, too, but with more success. Ken Livingstone was at the head of the then Greater London Council, later abolished by Mrs Thatcher's government.
  It had been literally a divisive time for his party, with some former cabinet ministers splitting away to form the SDP. Meanwhile some of those on the left tried to unseat MPs they regarded as too right-wing, but who hadn't jumped ship. Corbyn had backed Tony Benn's unsuccessful attempt to become the party's deputy leader - he was very narrowly defeated by Denis Healey.
  So what had he learned from that period of division?
  "It taught me in London we achieved a great deal - on transport, on the environment - but it also taught me the formation of the SDP was catastrophic to the electoral chances of Labour.
  "The Conservative so-called triumph in 1983 owed more to the division of the opposition vote than a move to the left. But it also taught me that you have to take communities with you."
  There has been a lot of focus on Jeremy Corbyn's disloyalty to his own party. He rebelled on a quarter of all votes during the 2005-2010 government.
  But I wondered why he had stayed loyal to Labour rather than moving to any of a myriad of parties to its Left when some of the policies he held dear - on nuclear weapons and re-nationalisation - had been ditched?
  "I want to see a more equal, more just society and the Labour Party has always been the vehicle to achieve that, especially with its organic link to the trade unions. I have argued my case on lots of issues and I think things are changing."
  And this is his verdict on the 2015 election: "One of the reasons we lost is we weren't offering anything sufficiently different."
  Well, you certainly couldn't accuse him of not wishing to put that right.
  He tells an appreciative if not overly enthusiastic audience in Essex that the government's welfare bill "is absolutely brutal" and he will oppose the benefits cap.
  The cost of welfare is so high, he says, in part because of high rents - which in turn are a symptom of not building enough affordable homes. He rebelled against his party's abstention on the welfare bill while Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, despite their doubts, stuck with collective shadow cabinet responsibility. They see that episode as the catalyst for Corbynmania.
  He rails against tuition fees, but also opposes those in his party who want to see a graduate tax. He said that "wise" old Tony Benn had told him: "you should tax people because they are wealthy, not because they are educated."
  And he defends his policy of using quantitative easing - whereby the Bank of England would increase the supply of money in the economy - to fund infrastructure projects. His critics say it would push up inflation and erode living standards.
  He responds: "If you said to people in Germany I have a radical new idea of a National Investment Bank they would just shrug their shoulders and say we are doing that already. What's extreme about that?"
  And on challenging the agenda of austerity, he says his party has to be bold. The debt ridden government of 1945 - when, after a by-election, even Chelmsford briefly had a Labour MP - "didn't retrench, it invested".
  There is a feeling, though, that if his campaign isn't running out of steam, he to some extent is - cramming in public meetings, rallies and media appearances.
  "That's socialism," he says as he is handed, without asking, a glass of water mid-speech as his voice finally falters.
  He finishes by denouncing the legacy of the Iraq War and promises "whatever the result of the leadership election" that the party's grass roots will be empowered.
  Mandate for change
  And he does go on to get a standing ovation.
  But I ask him how he could be at the head of a shadow cabinet that disagrees with him on fundamental issues - such as the renewal of Trident - or indeed lead a party whose policies in some key respects are very different from his own?
  "Whoever is elected leader will have a very large mandate from the members and the Parliamentary Labour Party - important as it is - I hope will recognise there is at the very least a mandate for a full debate within the party."
  Andy Burnham has said he would not be part of a shadow cabinet that didn't commit to renewing Trident. Jeremy Corbyn sees this as a matter of party democracy: "I feel strongly about nuclear weapons. We have to have that debate fairly soon as the government might reach a decision in 2016."
  Possibly as soon a this month's Labour Party conference.
  Jeremy Corbyn is the front-runner in the campaign but his critics will say that his leadership would be dominated by those internal debates within Labour that would leave little time - even with the best will in the world - to take the fight to the government.
  But Corbyn insists "there is a thirst for doing politics differently". We will find out just how many people are drinking in his ideas a week from now.
target: In the third of a series of in-depth profiles of the four Labour leadership candidates, Iain Watson catches up with Jeremy Corbyn in Essex at the latest of his campaign rallies.